Monday Moaning

We have become too bloody lazy!

Yes, laziness has become epidemic.

The vast majority of people just couldn’t get off their fat acre to save themselves.

Gadgets, are the bane of modern living and our lives are full of them, a great number of them totally useless, unneeded and a waste of the earth’s precious resources in the making.

Look at this…

Pathetic!

What ever happened to lift, tip and pour?

“Oh, but that requires energy.”

It’s bad enough that you buy processed juice at the supermarket, but to stoop to this level is beyond comprehension.

Why not BUY oranges and get fresh juice?

“But I do! I have one of these.”

Another bloody gadget!

Whatever happened to these?

It’s bad enough that it’s made from plastic, but it’s far more ecologically correct than any motorised gadget.

We go further into this laziness thing.

Celery

Here’s an example.

You buy your celery at the supermarket, and usually a bunch of celery is far more than you want; so some, if not most, finishes up in the trash or compost.

Celery off-cut

Celery, like many vegetables can be grown easily from off-cuts, no need for a garden or seeds or even getting your hands dirty.

Next time you buy celery, could be the last time you’ll ever need to do that again.

Trimming your celery, you have the root end as an off-cut.

Stand it up in a saucer of water, and watch what happens. Once you have green shoots growing from the centre, put it in a planter with potting mix or home compost so that just the green is above dirt level.

You want to see the results? Visit 17 Apart

Next time you need one stick of celery, just break one off, no need to buy a whole bunch.

Maybe you didn’t know you could do this. That’s because supermarkets have made you lazy! They’re just too damned convenient.

What could be more convenient than having your celery or other herbs on the kitchen window sill at your beck and call?

We have got ourselves into a rut, and we can’t see how to get ourselves out.

But we can, we just have to turn the clock back, back to grandma’s day.

Because, if we don’t, we are doomed to be getting fatter, lazier and more reliant on resource wasting gadgets.

*Jumps down off soap box*

 

Monday Moaning

Electronic waste: we must design gadgets that don’t poison the planet

We discard huge amounts of electronics every year, creating a toxic wasteland – often in the poorest countries

We love our gadgets, but we need to find safe ways of disposing of them. Photograph: Oliver Stratmann/AFP/Getty Images

Record sales of tablets, laptops and smart phones. Ever smaller computers, and thinner televisions, brighter screens and sharper cameras. What could possibly be wrong with the worldwide explosion in sales of electrical and digital equipment seen this Christmas? Consumers love the sleek designs and the new connectivity they offer, businesses can’t make enough for a vast and hungry global market, and governments see technological innovation and turnover as the quick way out of recession. This is a new age of the machine and electronic equipment is indispensable in home and workplace.

But there is a downside to the revolution that governments and companies have so far ignored. In the drive to generate fast turnover and new sales, companies have deliberately made it impossible to repair their goods and have shortened the lifespan of equipment.

Hardware is designed not to keep up with software, a computer’s life is now under two years and mobile phones are upgraded every few months. Many electronic devices now have parts that cannot be removed or replaced. From being cheaper to buy new devices than to repair them, it has now reached the point where it is impossible to repair them at all.

The result is that much electronic equipment is impossible to recycle. As devices are miniaturised, they become increasingly complex. A single laptop may contain hundreds of different substances, dozens of metals, plastics and components which are expensive to dispose of. As we saw last week from Ghana, vast quantities of this dangerous “e-waste” is being dumped on developing countries where it is left to some of the poorest people to try to extract what they can in dangerous conditions.

The scale of e-waste growth is shocking and has left governments and authorities behind. By 2017 it is expected that there will be more than 10 billion mobile-connected devices alone.

From under 10m tonnes of e-waste generated in 2000, it has now reached nearly 50m tonnes, with every sign that this will increase by 33% in the next five years. Britain will discard over 1.3m tonnes of electronics this year, much of which will be buried in landfill, incinerated or exported.

The old corporate model of “take, make and chuck” is not sustainable. Our obsession with gadgetry and technology is now driving industry to open new mines around the world, squandering energy, biodiversity and water at every stage of extraction. Enormous areas of toxic wasteland are created and left for future generations to deal with.

Designing goods so they can be easily recycled is now critical. Companies must be challenged to rethink the way they make and source their materials to ensure there is no waste from start to finish. Gadgets must be reusable and repairable, and built-in obsolescence discouraged. Companies, too, must become responsible for the entire lifecycle of their products, especially when they become obsolete.

Governments must better monitor waste shipments from ports. E-waste is easy to conceal, and the black market is attracting organised crime. Natural resources have long been used to fuel violent conflict and human rights abuses, but now we must accept that gadgets can be equally dangerous. The sale of millions of computers and mobile phones, even the electronic toys that we will give this Christmas, is being driven by an increasingly flawed business model which is leading to a depleted and polluted planet.

Opinion:

No need to express an opinion here, because it’s bloody obvious!

Any company that sells any electronic gadget must be legally bound to accept that back on the purchase of a new one; and, be responsible for the responsible disposal of that gadget.

It boils down to this: If companies insist on planned obsolescence, then they are to be made responsible for the end disposal.

 

Make you Fink on Friday

First a repost from They say it’s in the Genes:

Switzerland by train

“Yesterday, we took the train from Paris to Zurich, passing through the valley of the Rhone… past castles… medieval churches… lazy, picturesque rivers… quaint villages… to Lyon… Basel… and then skirting the Alps and lakes to Zurich. The scenery was remarkably beautiful. But the most remarkable thing we saw wasn’t outside the train car; it was in it.

A family of Americans boarded the train in Gare de Lyon in Paris. They took their seats, parents and two children. Tanned. Dressed in baggy shorts and polo shirts with little alligators on them. Even before the train left the station, the parents had given each of the children an iPad. Then mom and dad each got out their own iPad… and plugged in ear phones. From our vantage point, we could see that Dad was watching some sort of action movie, apparently with super-heroes involved. Mom’s iPad viewing was never revealed. But from Paris to the Swiss border – three hours of some of the most scenic countryside in Europe –none of them even looked out the window. Nor did they say a single word to one another.

Source: Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly Read more

A couple of days ago I read a post that really disappointed me. It was about how to keep kids entertained during long journeys.

Then it went on to list a heap of electronic games and gadgets extolling their virtues.

Now I’m not criticising the quality of the post, it was excellent.

What disappointed me was the need to keep kids quiet. What disappointed me was that the kids were being deprived of the world and the natural wonders around them. What disappointed me was that parents had failed to teach their kids. What disappointed me was that we seem to have back-peddled into the Victorian era where kids should be seen and not heard. What disappointed me was that the kids were missing a vital part of growing up. What disappointed me was that parents didn’t want to engage with their children.

The world has gone so far off the rails, parenting has been abdicated to electronic bullshit.

Two weeks ago I took my ex and family to lunch, a costly exercise at a good restaurant. My stepdaughter, Ellen Suelen, at 14,  immediately whipped out her cellphone thingy (I’m not totally up to date with these gadgets) and began texting. I was so disappointed and I told her so. Ellen has loved this restaurant since she was nine, she loves the class, she loves the food, she loves being waited on hand and foot; and she loves the idea of no dishes.

She put her cellphone away sheepishly.

We talked, I said I had bought them here to enjoy themselves, to taste the food, to converse and to repair some of the damage of being a broken family through the separation, to show them what they could achieve if they studied. I had invested in this exercise, my investment amounted to R$300+. If she wanted to text through the meal, I would have saved a small fortune and given my ex R$50 and sent them to McDonald’s.

Kids should be taught by their parents to appreciate what is around them, if they don’t they are failing miserably.

We need to wake up and smell the coffee, not just drink it between texts without appreciating life.

Once again, it is ‘progress’ that is impeding our ability to be social animals.