The German railway operator “Deutsche Bahn” offers an “Environmental Mobility Check” during the booking procedure. You can compare your train journey with other options such as car or plane. They show several charts and tables comparing for example energy consumption, carbon dioxides or sulfur dioxides. Have a look at the screenshot for a travel from Hamburg to Munich.
The hard work….
Ann Light (human-computer interaction specialist), Dorothea Kleine (economic geographer, project manager) and Macarena Vivent (ICT4D specialist, project director Chile) from the Fair Tracing Team have just completed an intensive round of fieldwork with our producer partners, the co-operative Los Robles in Chile. We visited the vineyards and the winery production facilities, interviewed workers, vintners, employees and management and conducted focus groups and participatory design workshops. Here are some photos:
Observing the work in the vineyards…
Interviewing vintners and workers…
Holding focus groups with workers (finding out about their perspective on the wine value chain, on consumers, on Fairtrade, and on technology) ….
Conducting a participatory design workshop with the co-operative’s employees (conceptualising the value chain, mapping information flows and processes, identifying current data formats and technology in use etc.)…
Meeting volunteers, technophiles and creative students to discuss local content creation..
…and agreeing on next steps with the Directores (representatives of the members of the co-operative) and the General Manager of Los Robles, Francisco Della Maggiora Silva (in the picture with Macarena, Ann and Dorothea).
Los Robles were very friendly hosts – they even raised a flag for each of us on our multinational research team! (But despite Ann’s extensive efforts of persuasion the Union Jack refused to unfurl properly for our photo…)
Yes, there was lots of very good wine. But we also raised a glass of typical Chilean “Mote con huesillos” (yummy peach syrup with dried peach and boiled wheat) in Curicó’s famous Café Montero in honour of Maria Montero, our valiant Research Assistant who stayed in London to hold the fort while we were away on our fieldwork visit to Chile. Cheers, Cote!
Most of us are aware of the waste we produce, and the fact that we are operating in a culture where we are encouraged to throw things away and replace them with new rather than fix them. Just as we can cut down on household waste once we have information on recycling, or cut our energy use once we are made aware of how to do so, so we can limit the environmental impact of the goods we buy when we have clear information about their history.
Design students were asked to look at any common household durable product and design a visual representation of its lifetime use of material resources from ‘cradle to grave’. The information had to be presented in a form that a consumer would use, such as an information leaflet, a website page, or a display on a mobile phone, in a compelling way. It’s aimed at enabling consumers to make an informed choice about their goods before they buy, or to inform retailers about a product’s environmental credentials before they order from their suppliers.
Dorothea, Maca and I have had a most exciting week in Curico with our excellent partners at Los Robles. Marta has shown us how chemical analysis ensures quality control; Paula has shared her expertise in mixing grapes to produce the best from the harvest; Diana has described the social programme of the collective; Felipe, Fidel and Pablo have introduced the documentation processes that see conversion from kilos of grapes to litres of wine; Francisco and Sergio have explained the value of FairTrade – and we happened to meet Leo of FLO conducting one of his regular assessment visits, so we had an interesting chat with him too. We ran a workshop on how all the different information that contributes to wine production might be made available and intelligible to ethical consumers, held a drinks event for anyone interested in contributing their stories and images from daily life, sampled collective life with an evening of ‘asado’ and vino Los Robles (see picture below), and made two visits to meet producers in their vineyards. (And that was all before breakfast!)
Our hosts are really friendly and my Spanish skills are increasing exponentially (from a very small base). I can’t believe that it’s all over for this visit in just three days…
Dorothea and Maca say hi!
Actics.com, the “Ethical Facebook” (TreeHugger)
Whether you are a business or an individual, Actics provides you with an ethical reality check and helps you turn your ethical visions into authentic actions. By signing up to this free social network, your corporate values will shine in the spotlight- a type of transparency more and more in demand, no matter what industry you belong to. It also works the other way around for you. If you are the one looking for a restaurant, lawyer or school, you can check out the ones with a high Actics rating and the ethical values important to you.
How does is work? Like with any other social network, you register and define who you are for your profile. Since this one is all about actions and ethics, you get to choose your corporate or personal values and state how you act them out. It is then up to your friends, clients or investors to rate you out of 100 for how true you are to your values. To help you out, they can also send you suggestions and endorse you. A great feature of this software is that a plugin, showing your ethical performance, can be integrated into your website or your company’s intranet if you want to share your results with a bigger network.
On October 16th we met Los Robles at the Wines of Chile Annual Trade Tasting in London. Dorothea and I tasted the excellent new harvest 2007 and enjoyed the company of Export manager Sergio and Chief Oenologist Paula from Los Robles. We also met Joy Edmondson from Ehrmanns, Los Robles’ wine importer in the UK.
From the more than 90 Chilean wine producers participating in the exhibition, Los Robles was the only one with fairtrade wine.
Panoramio could be a good option to track the routes taken by wine/coffee in the Fair Tracing project. In Panoramio you can see the photos and the map at the same time. The example below shows the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu in Los Andes, Peru.
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You can download a free Java reader for the QR codes from http://reader.kaywa.com and try out some codes from the tryout zone. Here’s a nice graphic that explain how it works (from http://reader.kaywa.com).
“Join the dots: camera phones to decode new ad widget”
“Next week’s DVD release of the zombie-flick 28 Weeks Later will bring a revolutionary marketing widget, widely used in Japan, to the UK for the first time.
The film poster contains a square box full of black and white dots known as a QR – quick response – code. It contains information that can be decoded by the camera on a mobile phone with the right software installed. A huge poster showing nothing but a QR code has already gone up in London’s Shoreditch to advertise the DVD.
These “bar codes” are widely used in Japan to store everything from web addresses and phone numbers to product details. Rather than laboriously typing in a person’s phone number or an internet address into a phone, these codes give one-touch access to a wealth of information that can then be stored on a phone. Rather than laboriously typing in a person’s phone number or an internet address into a phone, these codes give one-touch access to a wealth of information that can then be stored on a phone.”
To read the full story that appeared in The Guardian on 5 September 2007, click on the link above.
Promoting European Traceability Excellence and Research (PETER)
“Promoting European Traceability Excellence & Research (PETER) is an essential Specific Support Action that provides an international forum for focusing and disseminating the results of European Commission’s €100M investment in research on food traceability. There is an urgent need for rapid consolidation and dissemination of European expertise to developing countries and SMEs so that they can have access to the global markets that now exist.”
