The New Citizen Newsletter #17
“Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting.” Jimmy Wales
🎂 Celebrating the urge to fix things 🔨
Yesterday was the second ever International Repair Day. More than 100 communities from around the world celebrated the “right to repair” by running workshops aimed at preventing waste and sharing skills. Campaigners are pushing for stronger legislation that provides improved access to spare parts and information about repair, as well as pressuring manufacturers for better product design to ensure that things last longer and are easier to fix.
Source: Positive News.
⛏ Depleting the world’s supply of carbon credits 💹
Carbon credits reduce greenhouse gases by putting a price on polluting the air and using that money to negate the harm to the environment. Companies that pollute purchase these credits as part of their drive to become carbon neutral, but now people have started buying up the credits so they can’t be used. Former oil executive and corporate lawyer, Andreas Slettvoll has created Chooose, a platform where ordinary people can buy up the credits and remove them from circulation completely.
Paying $36 a year destroys quotas for 5 tons of CO2, the equivalent of 17 flights from Oslo to New York. In the last year, they have eliminated 80,000 tons of carbon and tripled the market price of the credits. Slettvoll recommends purchasing them as gifts for friends.
Source: Green Matters.
🏝 Financing the great plastic purge 🙌
In Norway, 97 percent of plastic bottles are recycled thanks to a national scheme that pays collectors for returning bottles to shops. Now, Wilhelm Myrer, an entrepreneur in Oslo, wants to use the blockchain to rollout the scheme globally. Empower will launch its first plastic collection point in Bali next week and already they’ve crowdfunded enough to pay for the collection of 2,300 kilograms of plastic.
Source: The Independent.
🤖 Rethinking citizenship 🚀
This week, we caught up in the UK to plan the next steps for The New Citizen, but mostly we just ended up talking about Brexit 🙄 As usual, if you’ve got ideas, suggestions or tips for how we can improve the newsletter tweet us.
