December 17, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves energy, Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Community, Disability, Environmental, Food Waste, and Inter-personal Contact.
Casserole Club (http://www.casseroleclub.com/) is a community-led network where members who cook a little extra are matched up with other local users to share it with, with a particular focus on those who find it a little extra difficult to cook.
The tool provides an opportunity to get to know local people, encourages people to cook fresh, healthy meals, gives them a reason to try out new recipes and could reduce food waste. It also makes it easier to help members of the community that are less able. We like the practical, facilitate approach it takes, and the fact that it builds local social capital whilst tackling environmental issues, but we wonder how you could make the social aims more implicit and whether this would make it appeal to an even wider audience.
Casserole club is currently running in Reigate and Banstead, Tower Hamlets and Barnet and we hope to see it grow in the future.
September 10, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and social.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Community, Environmental, and Inter-personal Contact.
Have you ever made one of those journeys that take forever, where there’s nothing to do but stare at the countryside and dip in and out of radio stations as you weave up the motorway. With BlaBlaCar (http://www.blablacar.com/) that can now be a thing of the past. BlaBlaCar is a trusted community marketplace that can help you make some extra money by filling up the empty seats in your car. So not only will you make back some of your petrol money and have someone more interesting to talk to than the voice in your head, you’ll also help to save the planet. So far BlaBlaCar reports that it’s 3 million members have shared over 1.8 billion miles and shaved almost 500,000 tonnes off of our global CO2 output, making this a really great example of environmental behavioural change for the masses.
September 3, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Saves energy, Saves money, and Saves time.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
We love Nest (http://www.nest.com/)! It exemplifies the power that beautiful and intuitively designed commercial products can have in facilitating huge social and environmental change.
Nest, a new age thermostat, is a clever gadget that learns what you like and what you do over time to help you make tiny changes to your heating habits, saving you money on your energy bill. Brainchild of Tony Fadell, inventor of the iPod, Nest is an easy to fit, easy to use device that is very easy on the eyes. Boasting a iPhone app for controlling the temperature of your home remotely, and features like ‘Auto-Away” which autonomously lowers the temperature when it realises you’ve popped out, the Nest is said to be capable of saving a household $173 per year (and that’s before you’ve even begun experimenting with these amazing features).
This is a product that takes all of the advice of popular money saving communications and distills it into a practical and easy to use commercial product that keeps lowering your energy consumption even when you forget. That’s a clever, facilitative way to change behaviour. Saving households from huge energy bills, while providing huge incidental benefits for the environment that no one at the company even needs to shout about.
To read about Nest’s impact so far download their White Paper here: http://downloads.nest.com/efficiency_simulation_white_paper.pdf
August 27, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Saves time.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
In 2012 GetGoing (https://www.getgoing.com/), a startup dedicated to discounts travel, launched a new service called Pick Two, Get One™ which lets flexible travellers design itineraries for two trips and then leave it up to GetGoing to book one for them. The idea is that GetGoing is then able to negotiate deals with airliners willing to get rid of spare capacity for huge discounts. When we consider that in 2012, passenger flights were only 78.94% full (the equivalent of one empty plane for every five flights) its evident that GetGoing has a lot of inventory to work with.
This has the potential to provide a triple win as airlines are making money on otherwise empty seats, travellers are getting cheap holidays with a touch of serendipity and the world is (theoretically) seeing less wasteful, half-empty planes sent into the sky. To give you just one stat, if companies like GetGoing could fill even half of the spare capacity of just 200 flights sent from London Heathrow to JFK this year, they’d save the planet 5.93 million kg of unnecessary CO2 emissions. That’s huge.
So while the company trades on value, discounts and the underrated element of surprise, we think GetGoing’s Pick Two, Get One™, which uses the same ‘spare capacity’ model that was pioneered by Lastminute.com 14 years ago, has the potential to deliver huge and scaleable incidental environmental benefits in a sustainable way.
August 20, 2013, 7 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Environmental, Health, and Local Business.
When we first heard about Hubbub (https://www.hubbub.co.uk/) in 2011, the company with a mission to save the high street, we knew it had the potential to be something quite special. Bringing all of the convenience of online grocery shopping to your local independent, Hubbub lets you purchase items from various local shops, online, and have them sent straight to your door in a single convenient delivery.
Now, just 2 years after they launched, Hubbub is already operating within 35 stores and selling over 4000 products to thousands of customers. Hubbub works by attracting online supermarket shoppers and busy commuters, who wouldn’t ordinarily their local grocer, butcher or artisan baker, to their online shop and taking a small cut of these brand new sales. That’s a win-win for local retailers who, as Hubbub founder Marissa Leaf says, rely on volume to survive.
We think Hubbub is great because it helps to get fresh, healthy and tasty produce into the nations homes without relying on messaging, bribery or government intervention. Rather, it takes traditionally niche behaviours such as ‘shopping local’ and makes them accessible by building them into a convenient, easy to use online service. Plus, as a successful commercial business with a viable model for growth, Hubbub represents a sustainable form of facilitative behaviour change that has the potential to become ingrained in our national culture.
August 13, 2013, 3 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy and Saves money.
Issues: Health.
We all know that cigarettes are terrible for our health, yet 10 million of us Britons are classified as smokers. Most efforts to break this national habit have focused on communications, government interventions and cheap or free alternatives. However in a 2012 survey by electronic cigarette brand SkyCig, 83% of smokers said they did not want to give up the physical act of smoking (http://bit.ly/1323YKh). This indicates that even when these measures are successful in helping a smoker to quit, switch from stick to patch or chew gum, there would still be many large and unfilled cigarette shaped holes in their daily routine making this new behaviour unlikely to last.
SkyCig’s electronic cigarette presents a different way. Rather than aiming to completely change people’s (often habitual) behaviour, they help smokers to quit by providing a product that allows them to carry on smoking. Electronic cigarettes are nicotine vapourisers that look, act and taste like a normal cigarette, providing all of the social, personal and physiological upsides of smoking (including happy hands), without the dark side affects. Plus, while e-cigarettes are relatively inexpensive, they still take enough of a bite out of the smokers purse for the desired behaviour change to be taken seriously.
There are of course still debates and issues yet to be ironed out as this change-making technology enters new markets, but we think this $2billion industry is definitely one to watch.
July 16, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, Saves energy, and Saves money.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Environmental, and Health.
Named by Fast Company (http://bit.ly/ZzMPa5) as one of the most innovative companies of 2013, Green Revolution (http://www.egreenrevolution.com/) is a company that applies a niche concept (renewable energy) to a mass activity (the gym).
Selling $200 generators to gym owners, Green Revolution’s technology helps people to convert their exercise into electricity. We think this is a deliciously simple and practical way to introduce green energy to a mainstream market, using behaviours that millions of people perform every day to help cut their carbon footprint. At the time of writing, Green Revolution had already helped gyms to generated 214,049,837 watts-hours of green energy. That’s enough to power the Olympic Stadium for well over 8 days.
June 11, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy and Fun.
Issues: Health.
While inventors are busy figuring out how to create chairs that construct themselves and build even smaller micro drones there are other things which, for some reason, escape the innovation hype. One of those things is the lowly condom.
So, in 2011, California based company Origami Condoms (http://www.origamicondoms.com/) decided to redesign the condom. An invention that hadn’t been rehashed in a over century. Using a new accordion style design, the Origami Condom breaks down the traditional barriers to condom use by focusing on increasing pleasure instead of focusing on purpose and practicality. There is actually an incentive to using it, making “doing the right thing” of layering up more attractive, not just what you ought to do.
Today, over 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV, and some stats (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/index.html) suggest that over 68% of these cases were caused by sexual contact. As the condom is one of the only viable methods of HIV prevention for large swathes of the developing world (not to mention other infections, diseases and pregnancy), this could be a huge win for our global sexual health.
The Origami Condom is expected to be commercially available by late 2014.
May 7, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Digital Inclusion and Education.
There will be something else to do on the tube in the future. Three students from the Miami Ad School came up with the idea of setting up a virtual library shelf in underground carriages. Commuters can use their smartphone to swipe the book poster and download the first 10 pages. After finishing the pages, the service will direct them to the nearest library where they can borrow the full book. This project gets people back to the local library, enjoying reading and borrowing physical books again.
April 23, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Communication, Digital Inclusion, and Education.
Asking children to catch up with the latest economic, political and social issues is difficult, especially when all traditional newspapers are designed for adults. But Tokyo Shimbun cooperated with the agency Dentsu Tokyo to lunch a groundbreaking augmented reality mobile app which translates the articles from dense text into a child-friendly format. This app enables kids to scan specific areas of the newspaper with their smartphone to activate an onscreen pop-up with simplified language and cartoon versions of current issues. Kids might be hooked in by the prospect of a cartoon,but are inadvertently educated about the current affairs.
April 9, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
Since Amazon released the first Kindle in 2007, the world of reading has never been the same. The Kindle, designed by Google’s Lab126, is pretty revolutionary. Not only has it created new norms for readers everywhere, provided us with often cheaper alternatives to physical books and allowed us to carry thousands of bestsellers in our pockets, it also packs a powerful environmental punch. According to one report by CleanTech Group LLC, a Kindle DX emits 167.78 kg of CO2 per year. The same report also states that the average book is responsible for 7.46kg of CO2 over its entire lifetime. Now, in a survey by Ipsos Public Affairs the average person is said to read 6.5 books every year. That would mean that the average CO2 cost of each ebook read in a year is 25.812kg. You’d need to read 23 books each year on your Kindle to make it more environmentally friendly than buying physical books, but then every extra ebook you bought on your Kindle would mean a 7.46kg saving in CO2 for the planet. Not to mention a £1.57 – £3.66 saving for yourself!
March 4, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste.
The problem of food waste is an big one. 7.2 million tonnes of food and drink is thrown away every year – enough to fill Wembley stadium nine times over and costing the average household £270 a month. There are a number of services (including Plated and Hello Fresh) that have cropped up with one solution: the delivery of the exact amount of ingredients you need for a specific meal, pre-measured so none goes to waste. A good example of the incidental effect as it is convenient for the user, whilst reducing the amount of food waste. However it does beg the question of how much energy has gone into the preparation, packaging and transport of these make-your-own-takeaways.
The much cheaper alternatives of planning meals, using shopping lists, measuring your own portions better and reusing your leftovers (all advice from Love Food Hate Waste) are certainly more energy efficient but maybe these services capture a different market.
http://www.plated.com/
http://www.hellofresh.co.uk/
October 9, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Plastic/Paper Waste.
Beyond being a wasteful use of plastic, bottled water can cost you quite a bit of unnecessary money. The We Tap App lets you avoid this and quench your thirst by locating local public water fountains. Good wallet and the environment.
October 2, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, and Fun.
Issues: Recycling.
Self named the “World’s Library”, Book Crossing strives to make sure books don’t just sit on shelves and gather dust, but circulate around the globe. When you become a member of the site for free you can register your book which will be assigned a BCID (Book Crossing ID) that you place inside the cover. When you’ve finished reading it you pass it on either to a friend, stranger, or by leaving it somewhere like a café or park bench, then simply check back on the site to see where the book has gone and who has enjoyed it. Frequent users also upload wish lists on the site and fellow Book Crossers may choose to send used books along to someone they know will enjoy them rather than leaving it to chance. This gives more people access to great books, reduces waste, and if you are on the receiving end you get the benefit of a totally free read.
September 18, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste and Health.
More public awareness about portion control and the health benefits of watching how much we consume at any given sitting have pushed producers to create packaging that is user friendly and helps reduce food waste. For example, many pasta and rice companies have included clear panels on the sides of their boxes that indicate how much to pour out per serving. This makes it easier to watch what you eat, and helps prevent you from preparing more than you will consume.
September 11, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy.
Issues: Health.
Jordans was one of the first companies to start mass producing cereal bars in the early 80s, as an extension product out of their breakfast cereal range, which was itself only developed in the early 70s.
Oat-based granola was previously a staple of the 60s wholefoods movement that swept the health-conscious West Coast of America: very much the preserve of hippies. Jordans repositioned it as something that they could market to the American mainstream: an instant healthy breakfast, much more convenient than the traditional cooked alternative.
Whether their health benefits really did outweigh a more traditional egg-based breakfast is debated in Louise Hidalgo’s documentary “The Food that Make Billions”, but Jordans, and all the other companies that now make cereal bars, did bring a healthy snack that could be eaten on the go to the marketplace and the cereal industry is now worth billions.
September 4, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy.
Issues: Food Waste.
There are lots of meal planner’s out there, most designed for hard-working parents wanting some inspiration. What is clever about Tesco’s Real Food Meal Planner is it suggests meals in such as way as to avoid food waste. It provides a week’s worth of recipe suggestions in one go and if, for example, it suggests a recipe on the Monday that uses half a packet of coriander, there will be another recipe later in the week that uses up the other half. Reducing food waste in an incidental benefit of practical tool for busy parents who wouldn’t give it much thought.
August 21, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Fun.
Issues: Community.
The Waitrose Community Matters initiative makes giving to charity a bit more fun: shoppers get to pick the local causes that the individual stores donate to by dropping a token in one of three boxes. You’re only putting a green disk in a box, but for some reason people love it.
Every month, each branch donates £1,000 (£500 from Convenience shops), which is split between three local charities, while once every quarter waitrose.com donates £25,000 to be split between three national charities. Waitrose divides these donations proportionally according to their customers preferences, as indicated by those awesome green disks.
July 17, 2012, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool and Easy.
Issues: Recycling.
Another idea from Volksvagen’s “Fun Theory” campaign. This bottle bank was turned into a arcade game where players collect points by recycling their glass bottles into the correct slots as they light up. The results seem to speak for themselves as the arcade bottle bank was used by nearly one hundred people in just one night, while a traditional bottle bank in the same area was used only twice. Better for the planet, and more fun for us!
July 10, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Road Safety.
What service would make it easier not to drink and drive than to do so? Going out and getting safely home at the end of the night has been made a little easier by ScooterMAN and their chauffeur services that will get you – and your car – from the pub, party, or club all the way home. Their team of experienced drivers arrive on small collapsible scooters, and after placing the scooter in a protective case and loading it into your boot, ScooterMAN takes the wheel while you sit back and enjoy not getting a drunk driving ticket. Cheaper than a taxi, and with the added benefit of being able to drive yourself at the start of the night, ScooterMAN provides an easy, safe way to party as hard as you want, and makes the roads a little safer for the rest of us.
July 6, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, and Fun.
Issues: Community and Inter-personal Contact.
If a brief had been written that set out to find a way to get young people to gain an appreciation for old films, an understanding of the society, politics and culture of different periods, and a shared interest with people of older generations, Secret Cinema would be a perfect solution. Hoping to create an environment where you can live the films rather than just watching them, complete with elaborate sets, actors in character to interact with, and restaurants and bars of the era, Secret Cinema gives moviegoers a chance to cultivate appreciation for the old films in a new way.
July 3, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, and Fun.
Issues: Environmental.
Richard Reynolds, the original Guerilla Gardener, has transformed gardening from something practised solely by the middle-class middle-aged types, to an edgy pastime for young urbanites. It reminds us of Tom Swayer in Huckleberry Finn who turned the chore of whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into a treat. “Do you call this work?” He told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence everyday”. Soon Tom’s friends were not only paying for the privilege but deriving real pleasure from the task. He transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people would pay to get in on the fun.
You don’t have to pay to get involved Guerilla Gardening, but if they started charging we wouldn’t be surprised if people were prepared to pay. Would the same trendies have offered to help out in the parent’s garden’s? Probably not. And that is the great magic of Guerilla Gardening: it repositions a worthy behaviour (cleaning up where you live, getting to know your neighbours, getting outdoors, doing exercise) as something cool and fun.
June 26, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions.
Taking public transportation is good for the environment and your wallet, but having to wait for the bus, especially on a rainy day, can discourage many riders. Bus Checker, the UK’s number one travel app, makes it easy to find out when your bus will arrive without ever stepping out your front door and makes public transport more convenient and appealing.
June 22, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste.
800,000 tonnes of bread is thrown away per year, and a crazy 37% of bread bought is thrown away. Buying less is surely the solution but until recently this often meant the size of the slices was smaller as well as the number of slices in the loaf (small loaves were just big loaves shrunk down to scale.) Kingsmill’s Little Big Loaf has slices at full size (no disappointment there…) but there is just half as many of them. Very clever.
June 19, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions.
Zipcars (previously known as Street Cars) are a revolution in cutting down the number of cars on the road. Their site claims every Zipcar takes at least 20 personally-owned vehicles off the road. Multiply that by the more than 9000 cars in their fleet and you’ve got a really big number. Super practical, people use them to cut down on the faff and costs of owning a car, but also indirectly cut down on the number of journeys they make by car vs other forms of transport as they don’t have the own vehicle parked in their drive tempting them. After joining Zipcar, the company reports that 90% of their members drove 5,500 miles or less per year. That adds up to more than 121 million litres of crude oil left in the ground—or 829 litres saved per Zipster.
June 15, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Organ Donation.
Some countries, such as Austria, Spain and Sweden have an opt out organ donor system, whilst in the UK we have an opt in system. Currently individuals have to sign up to be a donor at http://www.organdonation.nhs.uk. The British Medical Association, many transplant surgeons, and some patients’ groups and politicians are keen to see Britain to change this, so it is assumed that an individual wishes to be a donor unless he or she has opted out by registering their objection to donation after their death. Certainly would make life easier for the lazy amongst us (ie everyone).
June 12, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Homelessness.
Buying The Big Issue isn’t simply an altruistic way of helping the homeless – there’s a well-written magazine in it for us.
June 1, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
The art of Swishing (going to parties to swap clothes with your friends, preferably ones brought with rather than those currently being worn…) was launched in 2007 and became all the rage (as our Mums would say) amongst certain trendy circles. Making recycling populist, sociable and even a little bit edgy. Find out more.
May 22, 2012, 7 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
A website where you can turn all your old DVDs, CDs and computer games into cash. The site is entirely focused around the benefit of earning money. Of course users are also taking part in the very positive environment behaviours of reusing and recycling (helping reduce the 2500 tonnes of CDs thrown away each year, for example), but this is virtually unspoken of.
May 18, 2012, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
People don’t use ebay to “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” – the alliterative European Waste Hierarchy, part of article 4 of the Waste Framework Directive. They use it to make cash. And empty out the garage. And get rid of presents from exes.
Plus language like “Congratulations, you’ve won!” (rather than, “Thankyou for spending money with us!”) makes the experience game-like and fun. Love it.
