Dog Sulkies: Pet Powered Mobility

dog sulkies

Dog owners looking for a more sustainable means of personal transportation should not look any further: the dog sulky is the answer. Dog powered vehicles have been used for the transport of goods and passengers in some European countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Compared to those vehicles, the modern dogcarts offered by ChaloSulky promise to deliver a much smoother ride. The carts benefit greatly from the use of bicycle wheels, suspension and brakes. Moreover, the dogs are not confined between two shafts. Instead, only one shaft goes over the animals’ back, making the vehicle lighter and giving the dogs more freedom of movement.

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Pottery Refrigerators

Zeer potNgo Practical Action is working with communities to make zeer pots – very clever fridges made using clay, water and sand. They consist of two earthenware pots of different sizes, placed one inside the other. The space between is filled with damp sand that’s kept moist by adding water, and the smaller pot is filled with food. The top is covered with a damp cloth, then as the water in the sand evaporates towards the outer surface of the larger pot, there’s a drop in temperature of several degrees. This keeps the contents of the smaller pot cool. A zeer pot can keep 10kg of food fresh for up to 20 days.

More low-tech refrigeration.

India’s Ancient Stepwell Architecture Cools Modern Building

“At the height of summer, in the sweltering industrial suburbs of Jaipur, Rajasthan in north-west India, where temperatures can hit 45C Pearl Academy of Fashion remains 20 degrees cooler inside than out, by drawing on Rajasthan’s ancient architecture. While the exterior appears very much in keeping with the trends of contemporary design, at the base of the building is a vast pool of water — a cooling concept taken directly from the stepwell structures developed locally over 1,500 years ago to provide refuge from the desert heat.”

Read more: Ancient ‘air-conditioning’ cools building sustainably.

Traditional Repair Techniques: The Japanese Art of Kintsugi

Traditional Repair Techniques The Japanese Art of Kintsugi

The Japanese art of Kintsugi, which means ‘golden joinery’ or ‘to patch with gold’, is all about turning ugly breaks into beautiful fixes. Most repairs hide themselves – the goal is usually to make something as good as new. Kintsugi proposes that repair can make things better than new.

Kintsugi is a technique of repairing broken porcelain, earthenware pottery and glass with resins and lacquers that come from trees. It dates from the 15th century. The kintsugi artist carefully repairs the broken vessel with a sticky resin that hardens as it dries. The resin can then be sanded and buffed until the crack is almost imperceptible to the touch. After that, the artist takes a lacquer that has been combined with real gold and covers the crack.

Check it out: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5. The first link mentions a couple of DIY-kits using cheaper binding materials.

Solar Cookers That Work At Night

solar cookers that work at night

The solar cooker only works for a few hours in the middle of a sunny day, but not at night or in the mornings when people actually want to cook. Working better means working at night. Climate Healers, an international development technology organization, issued a design challenge last year after their traditional solar cookers failed to catch on in mountain villages in Rajasthan, India.

The challenge was to design a low cost stored energy solar cook stove that could store solar energy without requiring manual interventions from the user. The energy should be stored for at least an 18 hour period and should then be delivered at the users’ control to cook their traditional meals at the times that they choose, which may not necessarily be when the sun is out. People should be able to cook indoors, sitting down. The stove top temperature should be about 200ºC, with heat delivered at approximately 1 KW to the cook surface.

Three US university teams accepted the challenge in early 2011. Later that year, dozens of Indian university teams entered their proposals into the Shaastra Social Innovation Challenge at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Engineering For Change has published the finalists’ papers online. The ten designs follow different strategies, using materials such as sand, aluminum cans, rice husks, water, salt, straw, or olive oil to store solar heat.

Find all the papers at Engineering For Change. Via Makeshift.

More Waste = More Money

A battle is brewing in Delhi, India over access and control to garbage. For decades, informal wastepickers and recyclers have turned garbage into cash. They cost the government and taxpayer nothing yet they significantly reduce the waste sent to already overflowing landfills, improve recycling rates and “cool the earth” by reducing carbon emissions. But recent government plans to privatize trash collection have put the livelihoods of the wastepickers under threat. Meanwhile, new plans to build incinerators funded by carbon credits mean the resources the recyclers depend on may soon go up in smoke. Watch the movie: Delhi Waste Wars.