Treehugger, one of our favourite 'green' sites - and one we recently blogged about - have teamed up with Domino - a home / lifestyle magazine, to rather grandly present the '2007 green list'. If you go to Domino's first page, it splits down the awards into categories. There are some lovely chairs in the furniture category, and no doubt the 'sustainable' fabric from California earns lots of green stars (well, until they've shoved it on a plane in order to get it to Dulwich for you to add the finishing touches to your refurbished sitting room...) but the 'transport' sector is rather limp. Under the banner 'Hitting the road doesn't have to mean hurting the planet' we get the totally inspired suggestions to either:
1 - Convert a petrol car to run on biodiesel
2 - Buy a biodiesel or hybrid car
3 - Ride a bike
Presumably I can therefore feel very smug and green having just cycled across London - trouble is I also feel very wet, as it's been throwing it down with rain intermittently all day, and I managed to 'catch' the heaviest shower of the afternoon...
But my point is, if this is supposed to be a list of green innovations and products for 2007, then the list above looks pretty thin to me. Is the transport sector really that uninspired that the most 'green' thing we can do in 2007 is tell people to go and buy a hybrid car - six years after they first hit British roads?
I've been labouring under the illusion that some really great products and ideas were starting to filter on to the market. Maybe they've just not quite made it to sale yet, or maybe I'm labouring under false illusions. But I've a feeling that in terms of green transportation ideas, things do get a lot more inspiring than the list above - I've recently ridden an electric scooter for instance - so over the next couple of weeks I'm going to put together my own 'alternative' list of 'green' transportation products and ideas for 2007. Watch this space.
Posted by Joseph Simpson on 28th February 2007.
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