Re-bi-cycle

photo courtesy Fast Co Design

A bike made out of cardboard. That was the subject line of an email my brother recently sent to me along with this link. Pretty straightforward and certainly had me curious to click through.

Apparently the cardboard bike was inspired by a cardboard canoe, cost around $9 to create and could carry up to someone who weighed 300 pounds. This bike certainly gives new meaning to the word re-cycle.

ReBuilding

Photo courtesy Joseph Yoon at Yummy Eats

It's been about 2 weeks since Hurricane Sandy swept through the East Coast and those affected have been trying to get their lives back to normal. It's amazing how you think a disaster like this can't happen to you or people you know... until it does. A few people in New Jersey that I know have lost their entire homes. A few others are still without power (and it's getting cold)!

It's always amazing to see people in times of crisis pull together and redirect the focus from their busy lives to helping others. Several friends of mine volunteered with the cleanup effort and I think Molly's essay summed it up well.

When I first signed up to volunteer, the obvious places noted that they were primarily looking for people with medical skills. I've been known to faint at the doctors office when I've gotten a shot, so I started to look around for ways I could help that were more specific to my skills. There are loads of opportunities out there lying just under the first level of obvious. For those of you who have extra room or a summer home to donate, you can look to Air B-n-B and other services to host displaced victims. And if you think that everyone has now found housing after the storm, think again. Many of these homes will take months to rebuild. A good friend of mine has taken in her parents after their Ocean City, NJ home was devastated. It'll most likely be 2013 before their house is back to being livable. For those tech geeks out there looking to lend a helping hand (or router), there's a NY Tech Meetup to get NYC area small businesses back in action. For those with extra food to donate there are plenty of places looking to help provide a hot meal, like our friends at Yummy Eats.

I've been living in Philadelphia for the past month, so I narrowly missed the transportation chaos of NYC. Life without an L train? A small silver lining in this tragedy is, perhaps, that we'll all consider alternative modes of transportation like biking and walking instead of driving. Finding alternatives like these can positively impact climate change, which contributed to this mess in the first place.

My own internet in my new Philly home has been down for the past two weeks. Hardly an inconvenience when others have lost entire homes, but I mention it because of another kind act of community. A large pine tree in my new backyard was blown down the night of the hurricane and the only casualties were an exterior glass window and my internet (and that pine tree). Yesterday my neighbor and I were talking about the tree which is still down and he offered up his internet until mine is back online. Perhaps we'll all start talking to our neighbors more. Although now that I have internet again, it is enticing to read about the hurricane effects rather than live it and help with it. But I hope to take a lesson from my 2 weeks of purged internet and get out there and do something.


Photo courtesy of StreetsBlog by Elizabeth Press

Take a Seat: recycle a chair project

Artist Jason Eppink's latest project, which is aptly titled Take a Seat, is an ongoing series of public furniture installations in New York subway stations. Subway riders are encouraged to recycle or rescue a chair from being thrown in the landfill, and instead place it in a subway station, where it may get some good use. Eppink's goal is to increase the availability of seating in subway stations, and anyone can place a chair, take a picture of it, and send it to his blog: http://jasoneppink.com/take-a-seat/?pid=39


photo via http://jasoneppink.com/take-a-seat/?pid=39

Trash art at the Suzanne Geiss Company

As soon as I learned of The Suzanne Geiss Company's inaugural exhibit on artist Rammellzee, I had to see it. Rammellzee created 3-dimensional sculptures of letter racers, which are poised to attack in futuristic galactic battles in order to liberate themselves from European meaning and iconic value.

As an admirer of all thing upcycled, I was fascinated by Rammellzee's sculpting materials. I saw skateboards, chunks of tire rims, cut up USPS boxes, spray can triggers, syringes, buckles, old air fresheners and much much more. The overall look of these letter racers hanging in an aerial formation made me think of the city's colorful diversity, and all the materials at our disposal. Rammellzee gave these materials a fantastic, fictional new beginning!

Below are images from my gallery visit. You can view this exhibit in NYC through April 21, 2012.

Recycle-A-Bicycle

Recycle-A-Bicycle (RAB) is a community based bike shop that works with NYC youth to refurbish bicycles for new use. The non-profit organization salvages 1,200 bicycles a year from the landfill, and teaches students bike mechanics and repair techniques necessary to get junked bicycles back on the road! Every purchase from the store supports youth programs and environmental initiatives. RAB reaches kids and adults with programs where you can earn a bike through volunteer work, internships, and a Kid's Ride Club, along with adult education courses in maintenance and cycling skills. RAB estimates they have diverted 36,000 pounds of waste from NYC's landfills yearly. That's a big impact!

Another program RAB offers is Recycled Arts, where young people can transform old bike parts into crafty, artistic creations! We're always excited to see people getting creative with scrapped materials. Take a look at our own spin on recycled bicycle with our bike chain jewelry:

For information on how you can get involved with Recycle-A-Bicycle, or to donate a junked bike, check out http://www.recycleabicycle.org/

Cycle

I recently returned from a summer vacation to Europe. One of my stops was Amsterdam and it really opened my eyes to bike riding as a real form of public transportation. Sorry New York, you don't have anything on Amsterdam quite yet. New York has done a great job in this past year putting in bike lanes and bike lights. Amsterdam is what New York can aspire to be like in 10 years. Pretty much every street had a bike lane and all bikers knew what direction to go in. Even the ATMs were bike accessible.


Whaddya think? Start replacing car parking garages with bike garages? You can certainly fit a lot more bikes. With a lot fewer emissions. That image below is an open air bike garage loaded with bikes. Not a car in sight.

License plate memo board

Getting back from a road trip? Put your travel photos on display with this crafty license plate turned memo board.
It's super-easy - each license plate already comes with 2 holes on top to hang from. Then, craft the magnets out of old pieces of hardware.

You can read the complete DIY at CraftZine.com.

Ride, Carly, ride!

Our very own Carly Miller is taking a RePlayGround hiatus this summer to ride across our country's west coast.

Here's an excerpt from her latest email:
"Week one has been filled with mistakes, extreme beauty, soreness, adjustments, learning to let go of the destination, extreme snack attacks (boy is it a shocker to be burning so many calories...), wild animals, remote islands with only one road that was paved last week, swimming breaks in the most pristine lakes, ferries, singing/ukulele playing, getting advice for sweet camping spots from locals, the biggest trees I've ever seen, headwinds, tailwinds, steep HILLS, hiking, detours for water...."

We miss you Carly, but it looks like you're having a wheel good time!

Bottlemania!

Why do we buy water when the clean, pure liquid flows for free from our tap? That leads us to question - is that liquid coming from our tap, in fact, pure?

Our friend, Elizabeth Royte, studies that exact question. Just as she wrote Garbageland and followed each wastestream from her Brooklyn apartment to the landfills and recycling facilities where they ended up - she does the same with bottled water in Bottlemania. She starts in Maine at the Poland Spring bottling facility and adventures on to water tastings and water cleanup plants in serarch of the answer - is our water safe and why do we buy water, when we can get it from our tap for essentially, free.

In many cases, when a water source becomes contaiminated, it's cheaper to truck in bottled water than to clean the source. But is clean water a human right? If we don't protect our own tap water, it'll become contaminated and we'll all be forced to drink bottled water And don't forget about the environmental effects of the bottling waste, the transportation costs and carbon footprint of shipping all of those bottles across the country and overseas.

Sure, there are times when the convenience of bottled water has its place - when traveling or when far away from a clean water source. But if, for the most part, we all continue to drink tap, we'll continue to create a demand for it and will keep our water local.

If we don't protect our water, then what's next - canned oxygen?

slower

We all live in this fast-paced, get-things-done-faster society. But I just read that if we all drove 65mph, instead of 75 we could reduce fuel consumption by 27% !!! I read it here via Treehugger.

Now, I don't own a car, but a whole lot of people out there do and drive everyday. What a huge savings with a simple change in habit!

With all that extra in-the-car time you can listen to some of my fave podcasts like More Hip Than Hippie, and NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

eco-smackdown tomorrow on Planet Green

If you're one of the lucky cable subscribers to Planet Green, be sure to catch me on the show "G Word" tomorrow (Monday, June 8th) at 7pm. At least I'm pretty sure that's when I'll be on. The episode is called "Nano Wires". In a short segment, I visit a car junkyard with our friend and eco-designer Evette Rios. We dig through car parts to scavenge and create furniture from the castoffs. What kind of car-part furniture do we make? Well, you'll just have to tune in to see.

these shoes were made for walkin'...

Someone recently pointed me to this site - walkscore.com - and it's pretty cool. Just type in your address and it tells you how "walkable" you are. I leave the math figuring up to the WalkScore people, but it looks like it's some combo of how close you are to restaurants, grocery stores, hardware stores, etc. Not everything is up-to-date, like they left off my fave coffee shop Crest Cafe. But maybe they're just one step ahead of me and know Crest is closed for the next couple weeks. Ha. Of course they're one step ahead.

My design studio scored a lovely 77 on a scale of 1 to 100. 100 being most walkable. My parents in rural Michigan are a whopping 8! I guess that's why my dad's the one with the pick-up truck and my only wheels are my bike.

Happy walking!