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Lovely review by Tom over at Infovore about the book Cradle to Cradle: remaking the way we make things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. As Tom explains:
It’s a book that invites the reader to envisage a world in which the concept of waste does not exist, and where re-use is preferred to recycling; in short, a world where products have a true life-cycle, rather than a passage from cradle-to-grave.
This way of thinking used to be summarised as ‘thrift’ (defn: careful and diligent in the use of resources) and reminded me of several articles I’ve read recently querying whether thrift was making a come back - as exemplified by this Telegraph article.
I decided to see if Google Trends data backed up this notion.
Although the data for the UK isn’t large enough to compare the terms ‘thrift’, ‘re-use’ and ‘recycle’ against one another, there are enough frequencies of these terms globally to get Google’s attention:
As you can see the blue line graphing the word ‘thrift’, is fairly stable, the lines displaying the search frequencies for ‘recycling’ and, more interestingly, the word ‘re-use’ have increased, but not that dramatically.
But take a look at the lower graph. It displays the frequency of the topics appearing in news items, and there you’ll see a distinct upward trend for both the terms ‘thrift’ and ‘re-cycle’, although the term ‘re-cycle’ is increasing more rapidly.
Unfortunately, as the data set is not large enough to display regional differences we cannot come to any definite conclusions, but if the vision of Cradle to Cradle is to be realised it would appear that there is much work to be done.
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If you have just blown the budget on a new high-definition TV, look away now. Japanese broadcasters and the BBC are working on a system 33 times more detailed than the best sets on the market.
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Maybe you don’t like flying, or are concerned about air travel’s contribution to global warming. Or perhaps you just prefer real travel by train or ship, where the journey is part of the adventure… Either way, The Man in Seat Sixty-One will tell you
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An online social tool for frequent business travellers.
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holidays that give the world a break
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Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide. So far we have 17,871 destination guides and other articles written and edited by Wikitravellers from around the globe.
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Deutsche Bahn website and timetable. Details when booking trains include a map, mobility check and details of the environmental impact of the journey.
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Are you traveling frequently using the same trains and would like to be informed about delays or platform changes?
SMS-Alarm will notify you free of charge about any changes of your journey.
SMS-Alarm: once subscribed, always informed. -
Up-do-date information about strikes and interruptions during rail traffic disturbancesfor Swiss rail users
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http://mobile.sbb.ch to access SBB’s time table via mobile phone.
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Railways are an environmentally friendly and efficient form of transport. Railway traffic accounts to less than two percent of all traffic emissions in Finland. Traffic emissions can be reduced by e.g. adding public transport services and bicycle and pede
