Category: Direct Action

Plastic Boat Sets Sail to Plastic Patch

The Plastiki is a plastic boat that has set sail to raise awareness of the all the pollution from plastics that’s sitting in our oceans and it looks like they are off on an exciting trip!

The purpose, said expedition leader David de Rothschild, is to draw attention to the health of the oceans and to demonstrate the value of recycled plastic bottles. De Rothschild and his crew of five hope to sail to Australia, a voyage of about 11,000 nautical miles.

The Plastiki, named in honor of Norwegian explorer Thor Hyderdahl’s raft Kon Tiki, is a boat like no other in the world. Besides the hull of recycled plastic water and soda bottles, the vessel is made of a hardened plastic called PET.

The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran rigged as a ketch. It will rely on the wind for propulsion and has only a small auxiliary engine. No such boat has ever made an ocean passage before.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/20/BAIO1CILMT.DTL

You can take the Plastiki Pledge.

Canadians Advocating Political Participation

Canadians Advocating Political Participation is a new organization born out of the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament group which has set out to get Canadians more politically engaged.

On the CAPP website you can read all about their mission.

Here’s a video introduction to the cause:

And here’s a Facebook group you can join.

Estonia Cleans Up!

You probably didn’t hear about it, but in 2008 Estonia cleaned up 10,000 tons of trash in their forests by recruiting 50,000 people. How? Through an extensive media campaign and a good dose of networked collaboration.

The “Let’s Do It!” website is here, but in Estonian. So here’s a video in English!

Based on the success in Estonia, the campaign has gone worldwide!

One Trashcan Per Year: You Can Too!

Living and not producing any waste is pretty impressive. A family in the UK set out to demonstrate that they can easily live life and only make a trashcan’s worth of rubbish in a year. Guess what? They did it.

“Our vision is for a zero waste UK; a country where we rethink our rubbish and start to view it as a resource rather than a waste product,” the Strausses write on their website, MyZeroWaste. “Our belief is that a zero waste Britain is possible if more energy, money and care is put into education, innovative product design and recycling facilities.”

OK, so that’s the why. But what about the how? How does a three-person household cuts its trash footprint so dramatically while still keeping up a typical British living standard?

The Strausses go into great detail on their website. Step one, obviously: Reduce, for which they recommend everything from buying in bulk to simply removing the kitchen bin (“The out of sight out of mind approach … “). Step two: Reuse (turning used coffee grounds into snail and slug repellant, taking their own food containers to the butcher’s shop, wrapping gifts with junk mail). Step three: Recycle (even sending their empty crisp packets to a Philippine charity that turns them into wallets, bags and purses).

Keep reading at greenbang

People in the UK Love Recycling

Some research that was released late last year found that people in the UK really like caring for the environment with recycling being the most popular green practice.

Green behaviours costing the least money and effort are currently the most popular with the British public, despite the fact that 59 per cent of people think that if things continue on their current course we will soon experience a major environmental disaster.

A fuller picture of environmental and other behaviours and attitudes based on the first annual survey of 100,000 individuals from 40,000 households for Understanding Society will be published at a later date.

Keep reading.