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I got an e-mail the other day from Colleen, a fellow eco-urbanist with a cool plan. In 2003, she went completely car-less which deserves some serious eco-kudos on its own. According to her calculations, by not driving 10,000 miles a year, she has quit making 6 million tons of global warming gases a year.
Here’s Her Plan
Colleen’s got a small plot at a local community garden and wants to plant a small patch of bamboo in her garden plot, so she can grow enough to build her own bicycle trailer, using these download-able plans.
Shared garden space + renewable materials + car-less transportation—that’s a pretty swell micro-equation for living sustainably in the urban core.
Here’s some pictures of other “make your own” bike trailers (including one with a solar panel to use for powering an electric car or home appliances).
Here’s the site for Carry Freedom, the people who produced the DIY trailer plans. They also manufacture and sell “The City” a bike trailer that fits in a briefcase…
Thanks for sharing, Colleen!
Jason
9 responses so far ↓
1 Rich // Nov 2, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Eco-urban to the extreme!
2 wburg // Nov 7, 2007 at 3:16 am
Looks like a lot of the bike/people pulled trailers I see homeless folks carting around: lots of ingenuity and use of recycled materials there, largely due to economic necessity. The big camp area at North B and Seventh had what was practically a showroom of such trailers the other day.
3 Levi // Nov 7, 2007 at 11:58 am
Good design truly does come from constraints.
4 wburg // Nov 7, 2007 at 2:26 pm
The lesson here is that we as eco-urbanists have something to learn from the homeless. Necessity certainly does drive innovation.
While I wouldn’t recommend it as a lifestyle, the homeless certainly do fit a sort of definition for low-impact living. Human-powered or public transportation, minimal-footprint living spaces, and an unavoidable awareness of the environment. The three Rs are all represented: reduction of resources used due to limited income and the need for mobility, reuse a valuable strategy (disposable plastic bags find uses from storage and insulation to impromptu rain gear) and recycling is a way of life (bottles & cans for money, cigarette butts for smokes, even “recycled” food from dumpsters and surplus-food sources.) Even alternative means of handling human waste (many folks camping on the river bottle their waste and dispose of it in dumpsters, rather than eliminate near their campsite, because it makes things smelly fast.)
5 Levi // Nov 7, 2007 at 3:38 pm
That is one of the unfortunate things in the world. More Money = Larger Footprint. To put it simply.
I know that my families impact was far less when we were newly married than it is today.
The by product of a society where the rich are over-consumers is that the rest of us all want to be like them.
Somehow we need to get to where smaller, more efficient lifestyles are what we all strive for….
6 wburg // Nov 7, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Some interesting ideas here–have you seen this before?
http://www.n55.dk/
7 Jeff Lyon // Nov 8, 2007 at 12:09 pm
We have to be careful with numbers. The author calculates “by not driving 10,000 miles a year, she has quit making 6 million tons of global warming gases a year.”
Let’s run the numbers; 10,000 miles/year*gallon octane/20 miles*7# octane/gallon octane*454 grams octane/# octane*mole octane/114 grams octane*16 moles CO2/2 moles Octane*44 grams CO2/mole CO2*# CO2/454 grams CO2*ton CO2/2000# CO2 = 5.4 tons CO2
assumptions: pure octane gasoline (C8H18), balanced equation; 2 C8H18 + 25 O2 - 16 CO2 + 18 H2O, at standard temperature and pressure.
Summary: saving 10,000 gallons per year equates to a reduction of 5.4 tons of Carbon Dioxide gas (not even close to the 6 million tons calculated by the author).
8 jason // Nov 8, 2007 at 1:01 pm
wow. i glanced through R55 and stumbled on this little doosey of a sound bite in the MOVEMENT manual section, “It is obvious that if we want to protect the rights of persons, we have to organize in as small concentrations of power as possible.” now i want to read the whole thing…
9 jason // Nov 8, 2007 at 1:04 pm
jeff. thanks for your admonition about #’s and for the correction…one of the great things about open dialog social media outlets like blogs and wiki’s are that they easily accommodate self-correction and refinement if people will participate.
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