With the ‘CLEVER LITTLE BAG :’, Puma kicks-off the next pivotal phase of it’s sustainability program.
The tens of millions of shoes shipped in our bag will reduce water, energy and diesel consumption on the manufacturing level alone by more than 60% per year.
In other words:
approximately 8,500 tons less paper consumed, 20 million Mega joules of electricity saved, 1 million liters less fuel oil used and 1 million liters of water conserved.
During transport 500,000 liters of diesel is saved and lastly,
by replacing traditional shopping bags the difference in weight will save almost 275 tons of plastic.
That’s only one brand, I hope others will follow.
But having said that, where am I going to put my bills for my income Tax? Andif they’re just switching cardboard for fabric (cause they’re still using a lot of material) than what’s the real impact?
The Places We Live (an interactive exhibition produced in cooperation with the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo) renders the day to day portrait of sixteen households located in 4 slums: Caracas-Venezuella, Kibera-Nairobi-Kenya, Dharavi-Mumbai-India, Jakarta-Indonesia.
Life size images and audio segments in the exhibition help create the experience of a personal encounter with the slum dwellers. Each slum is represented by one room, where all four walls are built out of rear-projection canvas.
here are a couple of samples :
With a population swelling above 18 million, Mumbai is the world’s most densely populated urban area.
Even though it is the richest city of india, about two-thirds of its residents live in poverty, or slums. Dharavi, Mumbai’s most infamous slum, is home to about one million residents living off the official city grid.
It is likely to vanish within a decade to make way to middle class apartment blocks.
This is the Shilpiri Household (Dharavi, mumbai, India) : [ PLAY the vocal translation : ]
Kibera, East Africa’s largest slum, is home to a quarter of the Nairobi’s population.
About 700 000 people squeeze into a piece of land the size of New York’s Central Park.
Because of it’s unauthorized status, ir receives no municipal services such as public water, sanitation, schools, health care, etc.
This is the Arori Household (Kibera, Nairobi, kenya) : [ PLAY the vocal translation : ]
The scariest images you can find are the ones of kid’s beauty pageants contestants. Susan Anderson’s pictures are straight shots of little girls (as young as 4) in their competitive finery.
The crumbling island Hashima [a former coal mining facility] was once the most densely populated place on earth : In the 50’s over 13k people shared each square kilometre in its high-rises. It operated from 1887 until 1974 under Mitsubishi Motors co. But when the coal industry fell into decline, the mines were shut.
Packing what they could, leaving the rest to rot, the entire island population fled to the mainland in the blink of an eye…
Once thought to be of limitless capacity, the ocean is filling up with garbage, most of it plastic. Every square mile of ocean contains 50 000 pieces of trash
and 1 000 miles north of Hawaii there is a floating layer of debris the size of the continental United States.
These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
PleaseRobMe.com PleaseRobMe claims to reveal the location of empty homes based on what people post online.
It extracts information from people who have chosen to post their whereabouts automatically onto Twitter.
Edward Burtynsky, Iberia Quarries # 8, Cochicho Co., Pardais, Portuga
Nadav Kander Bathers, Yibin, Sichuan Yangtze, The Long River Series
Chris Steele-Perkins, Japanese Self Defence Force weapons training between Gotemba and Fujinomiya
Chris Steele-Perkins, Car park near Gotemba
Ed Kashi, Nigeria, 2006 Curse of the black gold: 50 years of oil in the Niger Delta
The Prix Pictet is the world’s first major prize dedicated to photography and sustainability.
It has a unique mandate – to use the power of photography to communicate vital messages to a global audience.
This is art of the highest order, applied to confront the pressing social and environmental challenges of the new millennium.
This year the theme of the award is earth.
Earth refers to the planet and the soil beneath our feet, to the marks that man makes on the face of the land – either directly through the creation of mines, toxic waste, urban wastelands, mountainous refuse dumps and blasted desert landscapes; or indirectly, through the scars left by fire, flood or famine and the impact of natural disasters: earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes or the migrations of displaced people.
Exhibition dates at the Empty Quarter Gallery: 9 February – 6 March 2010, so there’s still time.. If you happen to be in Dubai..
Nadav Kander is the winner of the Prix Pictet 2009.
