Entries tagged with ‘environment’
Social networking websites are sprouting up around the globe faster than we can keep up with them. It’s no wonder that small companies have found a new “gold rush” in supplying a wide variety of innovative tools and services for their members. Each promising newer and more amazing features so that their members can create better and more personalized “windows” of themselves. (Makes me think of all those quaint storefronts in Salzburg, Austria at Christmas.)
I belong to quite a few of them and have tested many of the “options & gadgets” that are offered. One of them has just caught my eye – I AM GREEN available on FACEBOOK.
Residing under the “Applications” section of the FACEBOOK site, this option to lets you check off eco-actions (or leaves, as they call it) to indicate the things you typically do in favor of the planet. These engagements then show up on your profile and you can then invite your “Facebook friends” to join you. It has spiraled into over 24,500 users and over 700,000 different “leaves”!
And while creating personal “windows” on social networking sites may be a fad, “greenness” is most likely here to stay. Everyday, more and more people are changing the way they live and once they do, they are not turning back. I for one am very happy to see that Facebook is providing people with an opportunity to express themselves in different ways.
The people behind I AM GREEN state; “When we commit to doing something good, we inspire each other to do that, and more.”
They must have read my mind.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: technology, society, community, environment
Laneo aims to support environmental protection by leveraging outdoor enthusiasts and their love or outdoor sports. Why? Because anyone who enjoys outdoor sports, whether for leisure or serious training, shares a common sensitivity to the role that nature’s beauty plays in moments of happiness. Some who get pleasure from sports in natural surroundings also enjoy extending that sensation to urban backdrops but the drawbacks of breathing in pollution, accessing installations, work hours, and the dangers of traffic often make the task difficult. Those that succeed literally have to “invent” workarounds.
For example – if you live close enough to your work, you could technically bike there, however there is no place to securely store your bicycle when they get there, there is no changing room to switch your clothes, and there most likely aren’t any bike paths on the route from you home to your work. Bikes loaned or rented by municipalities (like the ones in the picture in the Flickr Feed to the right, in Stuttgart, Germany where I passed through a couple of weeks ago) have started to spring up in major cities around the globe, but the return stations still remain far from many end destinations. A few companies have started to revisit the foldable bicycle (one of our partners did a wonderful job, Mobiky) and have successfully found this to be a new way to bridge the gap.
The point is that as individuals and companies we need to continue to find ways to bring our outdoor passion into our urban jungle – instead of dividing them into two different categories. The more successful we become at this, the more successful we will be at protecting them both. Preserving our great outdoors is not just for “the weekends”.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: partners, environment
Why do we have parks? I mean, we all love them and like to romp around in them but, why do we really need all the rules and regulations that go with them? I personally don’t like the feeling of paying to enter a park, a place that is supposed to be natural and accessible by anyone.
According to Wikipedia “A national park is a reserve of land, usually declared and owned by a national government, protected from most human development and pollution”. Protected? From what? From us? That’s what bothers me. Why would anyone want to destroy (willingly or involuntarily) something as beautiful as a great reserve of nature at it’s finest. I think it’s a question of attitude. You can call it something else if you prefer but most often attitude stems from some form of education. In the case of pollution or destruction of natural resources, it’s a “lack of” education. Some of us regard people that harm the outdoors as irresponsible but I think it the opposite. Remember how it was the first time your grandparents or parents took you into a forest and showed you the trees, plants and animals? How did you feel? Some children are negatively overwhelmed by this experience and carry it forward to their adult life where it expresses itself as disrespect towards nature. Littering, destruction and overuse of our natural habitat are all forms of this subconscious apprehension. Laneo aims to serve as a community that brings awareness to this issue and promotes a new attitude towards nature and society.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: community, environment
I’ve got quite a growing collection of partially recycled outdoor wear, basically shirts and polar sweaters, and I keep asking myself is it really as efficient as I think it is. The Economist wrote an interesting article recently about the “Truth of Recycling” (The Economist Quarterly, June 9th 2007) that I suggest you get you’re hands on and it provided a number of conclusions that answered a few of my questions notably; the future of recycling.
When I talk with manufacturers about this issue they are quick to point out that although it is technically feasible for certain products, it is costly and they are uncertain about its impact on sales, thus reluctant to make the investment. When I created Laneo, I imagined one day being able to help manufacturers in developing new products, collaboratively designed by Laneo’s member community. The Economist article underlines this by pointing out the need to design products with recycling in mind – meaning “closed-loop” manufacturing cycles, that obliges people to look at the entire life-cycle of a product. This conclusion clearly defends the positive impact that such a strategy would have on energy consumption, raw materials and pollution.
Recycling, in order to be really efficient, needs to be taken into account at the design stage. I believe a real revolution is coming. Prices of renewable products will drop dramatically and the end customer will really benefit from the “green” advantage.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: news, environment
At Laneo, as part of our core mission to help preserve the planet, we feel we have an obligation to support the small and weak. There are quite significantly more small sport companies and local ecological groups around the world than there are large ones. It’s not that we don’t like the big guys; we just think that there are a lot of minor players out there that don’t get enough attention and backing. We also think that the impact of not defending these companies and associations is detrimental to local culture, traditions, creativity & innovation and most of all, the state of the planet. Is it better to inject resources into one big thing or a vast series of small things?
A friend of mine, who teaches at INSEAD, said to me that Nobel Prize winner Muhammed Yunus (Grameen Bank) did not pioneer “micro-credit”, he only managed to make it understandable to those that could put it into action.
Now, ask yourself the following question; if you could contribute in supporting hundreds of small eco-efforts around the globe, wouldn’t that probably spark other small initiatives? That’s the direction we’re headed and we count on the global collective conscious of thousands of people who love the great outdoors as the leverage to achieve that goal.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: society, environment
At a conference not long ago, a Director at one of the Outdoor Sports most admired companies in the world, spoke some solemn words into his microphone that have stayed with me ever since. Someone in the audience had poked at him stating that his company had not done enough for environmental protection. He said something along the lines that, regardless of the efforts that his company made to produce and sell biological friendly equipment, people just kept buying the cheapest stuff made from the not-so friendly material. I wanted to jump in and defend this guy (whom I actually admire), but something inside me was saying that I didn’t really have an answer at the time.
On the one side, society blames industry for not doing their part and for producing stuff people really don’t need made from highly toxic substances – shame on them. On the other side, these companies are made up of the same people that are doing what their customers “tell” them, – making more of that weird day glow orange synthetic highly technical fabric. If the sales statistics say so, it must be what the consumers want right? My view is the following. What if the people who buy the stuff didn’t really know how to get their point across, and the people who make the stuff, didn’t really ask the right questions?
If you look at some pretty easy statistics that most anyone can get their hands on; roughly 40% of any outdoor sports gear purchases are made based on “price” alone, 25% based on the technical aspects of the product and 25% on looks, which leaves us with 10% in which you find things like – referrals (from friends), popularity of the product (fashion) and somewhere in there, the eco footprint of that product.
That’s where Laneo comes in. We want to bridge the divide in this world of misinterpretation. After all, when products reach maturity (which this very general analysis tells us), differentiation naturally concentrates itself on the very small denominators that don’t come across in run-of-the mill market research. So, please support our upcoming events and surveys. Your participation will help level out the playing field and in the end, contribute to a durable way for us to enjoy our sports in a more pristine nature.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: environment
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