This how-to video shows how to convert old, unused 10-speeds into fast, fixed gear bikes, giving them a second life. The video shows the whole conversion process from start to finish.
(via GOOD)
Love this simple holiday decorating / repurposing idea:
Fill a crate with jars, candles, and greenery and/or pine cones.
(via Kaleidoscope of Colors)
Coffee Fellow is … made from eight recycled coffee bean sacks with original prints from coffee plantations around the world. … All sacks have individual looks that depend on which coffee beans are most popular in Stockholm at the moment.
Designed by Johanna Hansson; info on her here.
Previously: Coffee sack basket, ottoman, deck chair, and headboard.
Osian Batyka-Wiliams offers this candelabra from repurposed cutlery. Pretty cool!
(via Untitled Document)
Also noteworthy is this chair incorporating reclaimed timber:
DIY project du jour:
Make a lamp from cardboard and an LED lighting kit.
How-to: Desktop Lamp — Instructables
Have you heard that Instagram’s no longer just an app?
Now on the Web, Instagram users can follow other IG-ers, and “like” and comment on photos.
Unconsumption’s Web profile’s here.
What do you think of the new profiles?
Sarah Thirlwell’s vessels incorporate “reclaimed orange acrylic and recycled vending cup plastic bands.”
Nelson “Kio” Mukiika has a machine shop of sorts in the Kasese district of western Uganda. I say “of sorts” because he does not have access to basic measuring tools. Nevertheless, Mukiika is able to disassemble old bikes and re-weld them together into creations of his own design: Three-wheeled hand-powered bicycles. …
Mukiika can produce the trikes for about $170, well out of reach for the average Ugandan. (More than a third of the population live on a little over $1 a day.) The funding is provided by CanUgan. You can volunteer your time, form a support group, or make a donation to the organization here.
(via CanUgan x Mukiika: Turning Old Bicycles into Hand-Powered Trikes for the Disabled - Core77)
I no longer drink soda/soft drinks (yes, I kicked my Diet Coke habit!), but still find this information from The New York Times’s Green Blog interesting:
Of all the materials that are commonly dropped in recycling bins, aluminum is by far the most valuable. New aluminum sells for almost $2,000 a metric ton, so recycling old cans would seem to be profitable. It takes about 75,000 cans to make a metric ton, so each one should be worth about 2.5 cents.
But recycling the cans turns out to be harder than it looks, because the basic soft drink or beer can is actually made of two kinds of aluminum. The bottom and sides are made from an aluminum sheet that is strong enough to be stamped into a round shape without tearing. For the top, which must be stiff enough to help the can retain its shape and withstand the bending force when it is opened, can makers blend aluminum with magnesium.
When the two parts of the can are melted down, the result is a blend that is suitable for neither purpose, according to Philip Martens, president and chief executive of Novelis, the largest American supplier of aluminum sheet. The solution today, he said, is to mix the recycled material with new aluminum to dilute the magnesium concentration and reduce the metal’s stiffness so it can be used for the can bodies. Or, more magnesium can be added so the material can be used for can tops. Last year Novelis used recycled aluminum for 39 percent of its input material.
Nationally, about 50 percent of aluminum cans are recycled. But Novelis would like to raise that to 80 percent by 2020.
One big reason for setting that goal is that making a can from virgin aluminum requires enough fuel to make 3.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which amounts to three to four hours of average household use. Using recycled cans brings the energy requirement down to about one-eighth of that. So raising the proportion of recycled material is environmentally advantageous. But to reach that 80 percent goal, Novelis will have to find a way around the alloy problem.
![mollyblock:
Today: Cans filled with Campbell’s tomato soup.
Next month: After the soup’s consumed, the empty cans, with colorful labels still on them, will be repurposed as … art supply holders!
[If you haven’t heard about these specially designed labels, here’s a little info: Campbell Soup Co., in a promotion with Target stores and The Andy Warhol Foundation, packaged a batch of tomato soup in cans covered with limited-edition Andy Warhol-inspired Pop-art labels. The cans were made available this past weekend at Target store. (I read that some stores sold out hours after the cans went on sale.) The project commemorates the 50th anniversary of Warhol’s famed Campbell’s soup can work. A portion of revenue from the project will benefit the Warhol Foundation.] Now I have to admit that I don’t typically shop at Target, but I needed cat litter, and I’d read about the can promo; together, they gave me a reason to visit a nearby Target store! #Popartisforeveryone
(Taken with Instagram at Super Target)
In related news:
Campbell Soup Co. (CPB), whose cans were transformed into artworks by Andy Warhol, plans to turn potato peel and tomato waste into biogas to power its Ohio factory.
…
“This new biogas technology will improve Campbell’s Napoleon [Ohio] recycling rate to approximately 95 percent,” Dave Stangis, a Campbell Soup official, said … .
The technology will provide a quarter of the plant’s annual power, while curbing greenhouse gas emissions by about 16,000 metric tons a year, equivalent to the output of 3,000 cars.
(via Bloomberg)
Campbell’s news release (here) adds: The biogas project, which is slated for completion in mid-2013, will divert 35 to 50 percent of Campbell’s Ohio facility’s waste from landfills.
Anaerobic digestion. Renewable energy. This is good news.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9wsc4qa6f1qzgg3to1_400.jpg)
Today: Cans filled with Campbell’s tomato soup.
Next month: After the soup’s consumed, the empty cans, with colorful labels still on them, will be repurposed as … art supply holders!
[If you haven’t heard about these specially designed labels, here’s a little info: Campbell Soup Co., in a promotion with Target stores and The Andy Warhol Foundation, packaged a batch of tomato soup in cans covered with limited-edition Andy Warhol-inspired Pop-art labels. The cans were made available this past weekend at Target store. (I read that some stores sold out hours after the cans went on sale.) The project commemorates the 50th anniversary of Warhol’s famed Campbell’s soup can work. A portion of revenue from the project will benefit the Warhol Foundation.] Now I have to admit that I don’t typically shop at Target, but I needed cat litter, and I’d read about the can promo; together, they gave me a reason to visit a nearby Target store! #Popartisforeveryone
(Taken with Instagram at Super Target)
In related news:
Campbell Soup Co. (CPB), whose cans were transformed into artworks by Andy Warhol, plans to turn potato peel and tomato waste into biogas to power its Ohio factory.
…
“This new biogas technology will improve Campbell’s Napoleon [Ohio] recycling rate to approximately 95 percent,” Dave Stangis, a Campbell Soup official, said … .
The technology will provide a quarter of the plant’s annual power, while curbing greenhouse gas emissions by about 16,000 metric tons a year, equivalent to the output of 3,000 cars.
(via Bloomberg)
Campbell’s news release (here) adds: The biogas project, which is slated for completion in mid-2013, will divert 35 to 50 percent of Campbell’s Ohio facility’s waste from landfills.
Anaerobic digestion. Renewable energy. This is good news.
The above TEDTalk given at TEDGlobal 2011 by plastic engineer Mike Biddle (founder and President of MBA Polymers, which has developed an incredibly energy and economically efficient method to recycle plastics — by turning it into the raw material again) elicited over 1000 comments and questions on TED.com, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.
Faced with the impossibility to answer them individually, Biddle has grouped them together and addressed them…
