Green Thing is a nonprofit organization, based in Britain, that encourages people to tackle one mission, or “green thing,” every month. The principal goal is to reduce CO2 and combat climate change. These monthly initiatives combine weird clay-modeled figurines, pointers, a “tell me why” section that explains the science behind the suggestions, and fun custom video and audio clips.
Green Thing actions are designed to be easy, effective, and fun. As a general principle, human power is good, machine power bad, with shades of grey in between. So, while things like using clotheslines, or walking rather than driving, may be the ideal, practical site suggestions include running fully loaded washing machines or carpooling. As Green Thing proclaims, “So if you can do something with your own steam power rather than labour-saving machine power, please do it. And if you have to use a machine, use it as efficiently as possible.”
January’s Green Thing is entitled Take the Stairs. Avoiding elevators is the main target, but sideline goals for the month include Don’t Use a Driving Machine. Green Thing’s video, Touching the Stairs, brings the month’s mission to life. Watch the stair climbing team “risk their lives by trying to reach the third floor. It’s a story of guts and sacrifice; a story of genuine heroes who don’t know the meaning of the word ‘lift’ – or do they?”
Past projects have included October’s Carectomy-friendly Walk Once. Featured actions included Don’t Own a Car, Walk on Pedals, and Share Your Car.
Green Thing visitors can sign up to participate in the activities, and the site will track the effect their online community has on CO2 emissions.
Green Thing visitors can sign up to participate in the activities, and the site will track the effect their online community has on CO2 emissions.
From Green Thing:
Green Thing is 109 days old today. So far, 43,510 people have paid Green Thing a visit, 4,341 of those have signed up doing 5,532 Green Things saving 691.64 tonnes of CO2 (if that doesn’t sound impressive enough, try 691,635 kgs).
Coincidentally, this is also what a Wembley stadium-full of Muse fans saluting 540 hours worth of guitar solos with butane-fuelled Bic lighters would produce.
More to the point, this has reduced the world’s annual man-made emissions by 0.000000026%. Well it’s a start and while it’s a small step for CO2 reduction it’s a big step for the Green Thing community worldwide. Group hug.
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I live in Seattle, and it seems that no one likes bikes when its raining.
Since it’s *always* raining, and Seattle is known for a very vibrant, active bike scene, how could that be true? I’ve seen a lot of rain gear, fenders galore, and disc brakes in Seattle… seems to me like tons of people there just get used to it and keep on riding.
Crap… typo. I meant “always RAINING,” of course…
Maybe one day some American city will get to the level that bike-crazy Amsterdam has. Now THAT is a biking-friendly city.
Richard Daley doesn’t just want more bikes to clean up his image for the olympic bid, he knows that eventually, he can start charging bicyclists for yearly bike registrations. Also, with the new “red light cameras” he’ll be able to ding them every time they run a red light too!
Not saying it’s a bad thing obviously to have more bikes, just that you may see more cities adopting this kind of policy because they think it can make them more money in addition to greening their image.