Commuting Gems...Recycling's Foot Soldiers

Sometimes inspiration come from the most unlikely places.

Tucked into my seat on the train earlier this week, flicking through The Metro with the patter of raindrops on the window in the background, I came across this...

No it's not a version of MJ's Bille Jean video souped up for the cyber generation. It's actually the latest and greatest in the harvesting of natural energy sources.

Pavegen is the brainchild of Laurence Kemball-Cook, a young British entrepreneur who has combined a recycled rubber and polymer mix with a hybrid kinetic energy-harvesting system. Stepping onto the 'tile' generates between 5 and 8 joules of electricity - a small percentage of this is used to the light the tile while the majority is either stored in a battery or powers the surrounding area.

It might sound like small potatoes but Kemball-Cook took a Pavegen dancefloor to Bestival last year where the grooves of 50,000 festival-goers charged 1,000 mobile phones. They have been installed (Pavegen that is, not the festival-goers) permanently at a school and more recently at Westfield Stratford City.

It's extraordinary and exciting stuff. Imagine...our 'energy output' collected and tranformed into a unique - and boundless when you think about it - source of electricity. 

Brings a whole new meaning to the term recycling, doesn't it?

Part Of The Plan?

I am reliably informed that today, aside from being Good Friday (and a good Friday it is here in the English sunshine), it is International Mother Earth Day.

Established in 2009 by the General Assembly, its aim is to:

"...promote[s] a view of the Earth as the entity that sustains all living things found in nature. Inclusiveness is at the heart of International Mother Earth Day; fostering shared responsibilities to rebuild our troubled relationship with nature..."  General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann

 ...and it was this 'troubled relationship with nature' that I was thinking about on my commute home last night.

In the first four months of 2011, we have seen nature at her most fearsome - earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornados just to name a few - and many reports suggest that these events are random or at least illogical in nature.  We don't expect them and particularly given the catalogue of tragic events during the first part of this year, we can't understand how and why everything is happening 'at once'. 

Is it really our impact on the environment, changing the climate, that unleashes nature's fury?  Is Mother Nature really coming home to roost?

But, I thought, what if we turned this thinking around? What if this is all part of some greater scheme?  That Mother Nature is so much bigger and grander than we can ever contemplate and we, despite all of our blinkered self-absorption, are just tiny pieces of a much, much greater puzzle?

What if it's really just all part of the plan?

Something to think about...