Bottled Water

The Planet Gets Funnier.

Hooray for making planet-saving funnier. The American University just closed an Eco-Comedy Contest together with the Environmental Film Festival. Bless them for hunting down the funny in this sea of green seriousness. They received over 70 entries, and while the finalists included hardcore bikers, suggestive trash and some lewd vegetarian lyrics, the judges finally went with Green My House by Neeru Productions in Ireland (nobody likes sarcastic redheads).

Green My House is a look at some of the incredibly baller ways you can pimp your house green. Have you ever, for instance, tried the ever-sexy “swapping out your light bulbs”? Okay, so maybe we’re not ready to start a green SNL (or Whitest Kids, or The State, or Big Gay Sketch Show, or some other sketch comedy show you think is funny), but at least we’re moving past Artic Circle. Into creative endeavors that are actually amusing.

grist.org, for instance, has finally decided to let professional comedians, like Eugene Mirman and Aziz Ansari, donate some funny to their cause. Thank you, grist– you were killing us. Other semi-hopeful glimpses of a Sustainably Funny Future include the chuckle-inducing Green Shaman, or the “funny ’cause it’s true” work from Annie Leonard. She just finished a new video, the Story of Bottled Water, that will have you tearing up. With laughter. Okay, so maybe it will be the laughter of a deep and tortured pain. But funny is funny . . . right?

Go to the Green Museum

ECO ART: Plastic Bottle Installation in NYC

ECO ART: Plastic Bottle Installation in NYC

by Olivia Chen

Sometimes it is hard to truly grasp how much waste we create as a society. That’s why NYC-based graphic design agency, MSLK is creating an installation that is an in-your-face visual of the amount of water bottles consumed in the United States. The installation uses 1,500 water bottles, the number of bottles consumed every 1 second — that’s 90,000 bottles per minute Entitled “Watershed,” the piece is meant to inspire its viewers to consider the collective environmental repercussions of drinking bottled water over tap. The installation is showing at the Figment Art Festival, open from June 12-14 on Governor’s Island in New York City. Click through to see a video of the installation’s assembly

Watershed Assembly at MSLK 5/24/09 from MSLK on Vimeo.

Environmental conscious-ness has certainly strengthened in the past few years, but plastic, whether in the form of a bottle, bag or other types of packaging, are still everyday objects in most people’s lives. Furthermore, most people aren’t disposing of plastic responsibly: according to MSLK, 80% of water bottles still end up in the landfill. Not to mention the toxins that exist in plastic. Bad for the earth and bad for your body, there is no excuse Especially in New York City, where the quality of tap water is superior, DRINK TAP

via Inhabitat » ECO ART: Plastic Bottle Installation in NYC.

White Light Green Guide Published

White Light’s Green Guide promises to be an exceptionally useful guide to theater managers, technicians, and designers looking to reduce their environmental footprint while decreasing energy usage.  Details below.

Reprinted from Lighting & Sound America, April 16, 2009:

The U.K.-based entertainment lighting supplier White Light announces the release of the White Light Green Guide, available now from the company’s website.

Intended as a starter guide for those wanting to make their work in lighting shows have as little impact on the environment as possible, the Green Guide offers suggestions for each phase of the process of show lighting, from initial meetings and planning through rig design, set-up and focus, show running, touring, and final load-out.

“Many of the suggestions in our Green Guide are largely common sense,” comments White Light’s managing director, Bryan Raven, “but it’s often the obvious things that get overlooked when it comes to putting a show together, particularly in the final hectic days of tech when the old mantra of ‘the show must go on’ tends to win out over everything else! We hope that by writing some suggestions down they might be able to be integrated into the planning and production process a little better.”

The White Light Green Guide draws on the experience the company has gained in trying to reduce the environmental impact of its operations and working to introduce newer, more energy-efficient technologies to lighting practitioners. This process has covered everything from installing a waste compactor, moving to filtered tapwater rather than bottled water, investigating hydrogen fuel cells as a power source for outdoor events, and adopting a wide range of LED lighting products — as well as continuing the company’s principal operation of renting lighting, giving equipment as long a working life as possible.

White Light have also been involved with a number of other environmental projects, including working with the Arcola Theatre on their aim to become the world’s first carbon-neutral theatre, and collaborating with the Mayor of London’s Office on its Green Theatre: Taking Action on Climate Change, and with environmental organisation Julie’s Bicycle on its Green Music guide.

The White Light Green Guide compliments these by focusing more specifically on lighting, hints ranging from switching off discharge moving lights when not actually in use, to considering new approaches to attaching cables to lighting bars.

Designed to be easy to read on-screen, the White Light Green Guide is available for download only; it can be found at the link below.

Links:
White Light Green Guide

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Go to the Green Theater Initiative