Recycling Buzz

After a summer filled with news about declining bee populations, there is at least one bee that has caught our attention for the right reasons. Check out the 18-foot-high bee sculpture that landed at the Eden Project this summer. No ordinary piece of artwork, ‘Bee Clever’ – created by artist Ptolemy Elrington – is built entirely from recycled materials.

The immense apian figure perches on gleaming petals made of 120 hubcaps, while 1,000 plastic bottles make up its body. (You get extra points if you can spot the four car doors and two disused shopping trolleys hiding in the enormous bug’s structure…) Far from being just a bit of fun, the bee’s presence at the Eden Project will hopefully create a bigger buzz around recycling.

Zero Waste Hero(ine)

One woman has single-handedly made all of our attempts to minimise our rubbish look futile. Resourceful Bea Johnson, from Mill Valley, California, has managed to fit all of her family’s waste for one year in a small jar. The blogger and author of Zero Waste Home and her family have downsized their annual household waste to (very nearly) zero.

What’s her secret? She claims it is her mantra of the five Rs: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle and rot. She swapped plastic bags for reusable jars when buying meat at the supermarket and started making her own beauty products. And, with a Gloucestershire family also producing just a carrier bag’s worth of waste each year (and blogging about it at myzerowaste.com), it looks as though true zero waste is becoming something of a trend. Let’s hope it really catches on.

Insect Dinners

The latest kitchen gadget to tackle the problem of growing global meat consumption and demand is not for the faint-hearted or squeamish. University of Vienna design graduate Katarina Unger has created ‘Farm 432’, a small-scale fly incubator that fits neatly on your kitchen counter. The device aims to encourage more people to eat insects, a virtually untapped source of protein.

The black soldier fly, which Unger focused her research on, contains 42 per cent protein and is packed with calcium and amino acids. And with around 1,000 edible insect species in the world, the mealtime options are endless. Mosquito meatballs, anyone?

Brassy Speakers

When designer Christopher Locke needed a way of making the music from his phone louder, he headed not to an electrical store but to his local flea market instead. The outcome was a set of brassy, custom-made amplifiers. And we’re not talking brassy in the figurative sense – they’re actually brassy, made from recycled trumpets, trombones, horns and other instruments.

Based on an old-fashioned phonograph, the hand-made ‘Analog Tele-Phonographers’ not only serve the functional purpose of blasting out tunes from an iPhone or iPad, they look undeniably cool while doing it, and are kind on the environment, requiring no batteries, plugs, wires or charging. Now that’s music to our ears!