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 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 23, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Saves money.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
Since the the Oyster Card was introduced to London by Transport For London (TFL) in 2003, there have been over 43 million Oyster Cards issued. While there have been reports of waste on the Oyster Card with almost 44% of these lying unused, the Oyster Card seems to also be responsible for some interesting environmental benefits.
According to the minutes of an Oyster Card Briefing between the London Assembly and TFL, by 2009 sales of paper tickets had been reduced by 65%. Today it appears that figure may be up, with over 80% of journeys through London now being made using an Oyster Card. In 2010 TFL recorded 24.8 million trips to, from or within London. This means that in 2010 alone, the Oyster Card system was responsible for reducing our use paper tickets by 19.84 million. One report suggests that it is responsible for a saving of as much as 32 million paper tickets each year since it was launched. This is the equivalent of 26,335,507.98 kilograms (26335.5 metric tonnes) of paper saved yearly. That’s a saving of around 74.9m gallons of water, 16.8m pounds of solid waste and 82m pounds of CO2.
Considering that the 43 million issued Oyster Cards used a comparatively tiny 218,010kg of plastic and 903,000kg of CO2, this seems like a good trade.
*weight of paper tickets calculated using 100 business cards weighing 2 pounds or 0.907185kg
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 18, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Saves energy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Environmental, and Food Waste.
The Samsung Smart Fridge is the latest in a new wave of products hoping to form the first wave of commercial products to deliver on the promise of the Internet of Things. The Samsung Smart Fridge, as you probably suspect, is a connected refrigerator. It runs on Google’s mobile operating system Android, and comes equipped with a 10-inch wi-fi enabled touch screen that helps users to do many handy things like look up recipes, check their calendar, send emails, receive coupons, check their twitter and even track the expiry date of their food.
Whilst there is a public impression that more gadgets means more energy usage, this isn’t necessarily the case.
As technologies like this becomes more pervasive, they can make ‘environmentally good actions’ much more convenient. Imagine what a dent we could make in the 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted globally every year if every standard fridge never let us forget that the cheese in the back was about to go mouldy, or that we should really make lasagne today because as well as that cheese there’s also a packet of mince we bought and it’s expiring tomorrow.
We think smart, connected, ambient technology like the Samsung’s Fridge, may not only help to create a world that is ever more convenient to live in, but also one in which it’s increasingly easy it is to perform those little simple positive behaviours we often forgot, overlooked or couldn’t be bothered with in days gone by.
May 28, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, Saves energy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Environmental.
What we love about The Atom by Sive Cycle (http://sivacycle.com/), is it’s simplicity. It takes a 180 year old green energy concept and applies it to a popular activity to solve a common need of modern times.
The Atom is a useful device that attaches to the back wheel of a bicycle where it harnesses the kinetic energy generated as a result of your regular cycle. This energy can then be used to power any USB charging device such as an iPhone. That could be a god send for avid riders who increasingly rely on a whole host of mobile apps to guide them through cycling adventures.
May 14, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: job providing, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Health and Local Business.
Kit Yamoyo makes delivering medicine to remote villages in Zambia more attractive to local entrepreneurs. It is a clever wedge-shaped packing solution, that fits packets of medicine into a crate of Coca-Cola. Local distributors and retailers can make use of it, not needing to do anything more than they do already in terms of transporting goods from the country’s capital to the remote areas of the country and selling items locally, yet benefit from adding the Airpods to their usual deliveries as they share in the medicine’s profits.
The project was devised by Simon Berry, who worked in Zambia in the 1980s and set up the charity ‘Colalife’ in 2011, who’s core product so far is Airpod. An amazing way to reduce thenumber of people dying from diarrhoea (around 40 children under the age of five each day) whilst giving locals genuine incentives, beyond pure altruism, to get involved.
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!
February 19, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: Communication and Education.
Learning a language can be very expensive. Duolingo (http://duolingo.com/), is great as it is completely free. Fun and engaging lessons are professionally curated, gaming theory is employed so users gain points as they learn progressing them up skill levels, but you never have to pay a penny or be interrupted by annoying adverts.
In addition there is also an amazing and enormous ‘incidental effect’: the service is designed so that, as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents, thus contributing to making the web more accessible to all. The task of translating the web is enormous and benefits enormously from human input, as in this crowd sourced model.
The site currently offers Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian courses for English speakers, as well as English for Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian speakers and there are plans to offer Chinese.
January 29, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Education, Environmental, and Health.
The Waka Waka Light http://www.wakawakalight.com/ is a solar powered device that can charge electrical gadgets or provide a minimum of 8 hours light (and up to 80 depending on the setting used) from a single day’s sun. They are a much cheaper alternative to kerosine lamps so are becoming popular in Haiti, Ethiopia, Kenya and other developing nations for families looking for the cheapest solution.
However the benefits of these nifty lights extend much further. Not using kerosene improves air quality and reduces house fires and injuries from burning. Most inspiringly, there is research that highlights the improvements to school results that can be seen when free solar lighting replaces kerosene lighting. This is attributed to a number of factors including more income free for the parents to spend on education and more time in the evening for the children to do their schoolwork. Lots of hidden benefits for a lamp bought for its low price point.
October 16, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
There are tons of things in our lives like tents, electric drills, or sleeping bags that are occasionally, for short periods of time, really useful to have around. The rest of the time however they tend to just take up space and clutter our attics and basements. Oborrow attempts to relieve this by creating an online platform where friends can register for free via Facebook and list all the things they have that they think their friends may want to borrow. That way instead of having to buy a table saw to build that book case you can just borrow one from your neighbor and return the favor by loaning him your lawn mower. Great way for you both to save money and avoid needless waste.
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.
September 25, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money.
Issues: Plastic/Paper Waste.
It’s mental to think how many paper cups we each use on a year, let alone everyone in the whole of the UK, or the world. And all those disposable cups create heaps of unnecessary waste. Luckily Keep Cup offers customizable reusable mug options that come in standard sizes so they’re easy for baristas to use. In addition to reducing waste and providing you with a nice accessory, they also have the potential to save you money as many coffee shops, including Starbucks, will offer discounts for customers who opt to bring in their own cups.
July 31, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
You’re looking to get rid of your TV set, your neighbor’s son has outgrown his car seat, and your Mom wants to get rid of some old toys that have been cluttering her attic for years. They could all end up in a landfill somewhere, never to be used again, but Freecycle and their community of nearly 2.5 million members in the UK alone has other ideas. The site allows users to post items they are looking to offer, and others to post wanted messages of what they are looking for. Once a match has been made users simply set a time and location to meet up and give or receive the items for free. People use it to easily get rid of things they no longer want, and get new items you do need – all for no charge. But its incidentally reducing vast amounts of waste. That’s a win-win-win.
July 24, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, Saves money, and social.
Issues: Communication and Inter-personal Contact.
This helps people befriend new people, reciprocate hospitality and get to know new cultures and languages, but for the users, it is primarily a practical tool to find cheap accommodation in other cities. It’s packed with incidental benefits. CouchSurfing has a network of almost 4.5 million users spread across 253 countries. This completely free service can help you connect with people while traveling, or even in your own town, by allowing users to create profiles and search for people in areas they want to stay or offer up their own home. CouchSurfing hopes to create, “a world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter” and they are well on their way to achieving that goal.
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.
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 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 30, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Fun and Saves money.
Issues: Road Safety.
Like the Piano Stairs, this was devised as part of Volkswagen’s Fun Theory, and is another a neat idea. Everyone driving on certain roads is photographed by speed cameras, not just those speeding. Those within the limit are entered into a lottery, with winners receiving cash prizes raised from the fines of the people who were caught speeding. Taps into the human love of gambling and games a classic case of “there’s something in it for me”. 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.
May 16, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Plastic/Paper Waste, and Recycling.
ifixit makes it easy for you to fix technical items yourself with online step-by-step repair guides, troubleshooting tips, and thriving community of repair technicians who want to help. They also sell service parts and tools.
They were set up as a profit making business that would be useful for people, helping them do their own repairs to and save money, but have great eco-credentials built in which have only more recently been mentioned as a benefit on their site.
May 4, 2012, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Saves money.
Issues: CO2 Emissions.
The government guarantees you a fixed price per kW hour of electricity you produce, whether you use it or not, via Feed-in tariffs. This price depends when you install your panels and connect to the grid, but it currently 41.3p per kWhr, and is guaranteed for 25 years. Solar panels (eg from this good company) are now for money-grubbers not just eco-warriors.
April 22, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste.
If like us you Love Food, Hate Waste, then you’ll love Heinz resealable fridge packs which mean your beans last longer.
April 16, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Communication.
Skype makes not flying for face-to-face business meetings a reality. In a 2010 survey, almost half of SMEs in the UK reported plans to increase their use of video conferencing and 59% expected to reduce their business travel as a result. Given that business flights account for around 10% of air travel and air travel accounts for 6.3% of all the UK’s carbon emissions, this represents a significant contribution to efforts to reduce our impact on climate change. Most people don’t use Skype for eco reasons – but because its cheaper and more convenient than flying.
