Drop seeds not bombs

When: 2pm-3pm, December 18th, 2010
Who: Christian Duell
Where: The Edge
Cost: FREE
Bookings: book.it@edgeqld.org.au

Ever notice those ugly pockets of your neighbourhood that need some love? This is your chance to paint the town green one seed bomb at a time. With the help of Greening Australia’s Seed Bank we have access to a collection of local native wattle and tea tree seeds to create our own self-propagating ‘plant in a ball’. In this one hour workshop you’ll be given all of the ingredients to make your very own seed bombs and you will be asked to drop them into abandoned pockets of your neighbourhood, photograph them and add their location to our shared interactive map. Our plan is to create a greener city and watch these local natives grow both online and in our neighbourhoods.

All materials are provided. Just bring yourself and be prepared to get your hands dirty!

Workshop Materials: Local native seeds, compost, ball clay powder and water.

This workshop has a MAXIMUM of 12 participants.

To book, please email book.it@edgeqld.org.au.

(image: http://waterbydesign.com.au/jenniferturpin/)

The digital age is often touted as being greener than the days of typewriters and faxes because it’s reduced the amount of paper we use.

Being ‘green’, of course, is much more complicated than using less paper.

Mobile phones and computers are made of plastics and metals. Plastics are extremely toxic to the environment. When they’re thrown away, mobiles and computers become toxic chemical waste because these materials. Their batteries are seriously toxic too.

Nickel is an essential ingredient in mobiles and laptops, and is highly sought after for its versatility, especially for its use in alloys like stainless steel. We get it from strip mines, the kind where you dig out hectares of land to get to the riches underneath. Then there’s the energy use in the mining to take into account, not to mention the refining process

There are a few ways to purify nickel ore to get the metal to a useable state, but all of them involve high temperatures for roasting the ore and release gases into the atmosphere.

(Nickel isn’t the worst though; that upside down crown goes to aluminium which needs to be fired at about 2000°C to extract the metal.)

While we’re on energy use, electronic devices aren’t the best. It takes energy to manufacture them, and once they’re in use, it takes energy to use them. Until someone invents a battery that lasts for years (sounds nuclear to me) we’ll all be plugging our junk into the carbon economy.

And then there’s the disposability of devices. Most mobile and laptop users get new ones everyone two or three years. That means half or a third of adults in the developed world are throwing away a phone and a computer every year. That’s a whole lot of toxic waste that could be leaking into our drinking water.

The digital age isn’t looking so green anymore.

Until this week when Acer brought out its new Aspire laptops that are completely free of environmental baddies PVCs (polyvinyl chloride) and BFRs (brominated flame retardants.

The green laptop market seems to be small but growing as more people become environmentally conscious. Disappointingly for Apple evangelists, Macs are the least eco-friendly according to Greenpeace, and the highest rated is Lenovo (of ThinkPad fame) with brick manufacturer Dell hovering in the top five for the last few years.

For mobile makers, Nokia of the ubiquitous charger has been top of Greenpeace’s list for years, and Sharp, LG, Samsung and others all have solar powered phones on offer.

The present is kind of bleak but the big guns seem to be taking greening the digital world seriously. I’m not quite sure whether to be encouraged or really worried. What do you think?