waste – wangũi

healthy environment, healthy people

I managed to attend two side sessions of the UN environment assembly last week thanks to my communications consultancy for the waste management company Takataka Solutions. I was duly impressed. The conference was focused on the environmental aspects of the sustainable development goals (which include goals like peace and…

why make one?

“Why make one when you can buy one? Why bother with all this wood-hammer business, Wouldn’t it be easier to go to the shop and buy one?!” My host brother in Brazil, Dimas, and I made a shoe rack from pieces of discarded wood he found at a dump…

design ingredients for sustainable waste management – ii

“So how should a city’s waste management options be designed? Labels such as those of UCT’s campus receptacles and Hoan Kiem Lake’s bins would communicate the importance of both recycling and reducing one’s waste. The placement of these ideal designed options would consider where disposer traffic was likely to…

waste watching in são paulo

In front of the Museo do Afrobrasil in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, there is a five tier coloured recycling receptacle with a choice of glass (green), paper (blue), metals (yellow), plastics (red), and organics (brown) bins. The letters of some of the labels have peeled off due to age…

at a swap fair in granja viana

Read the version in Portuguese here Issa lives in Granja Viana and is one of the representatives of Transition Granja Viana, an initiative of the worldwide Transition Town movement. According to her, the Swap Fair, also known as the Ecofair, is the biggest success of the Transition GV Group.…

bartering for sustainability

“But bartering has been around, even if only on a micro-level for a while too. In my travels on a fellowship studying forms of engagement with environmental issues in low-income urban areas, I encountered this sharing- what I call a ‘culture of exchange’- in various forms. It was in…