Starting today, we’ll be posting things we like every friday. They’ll range from amazing dishes to jars of pickles to cleaning products to eye-catching graphics. One thing you can be sure of is that they’ll all relate to our principal passions: food, beer/wine, and all things green, sustainable and design-y.
This week’s edition includes items that save energy, delay waste and provide us with yet another alternative use for corn.
Cordless tunes in our pocket. (see image above)
The Ventus Eco Media Player SPIN includes features that help it behave like its competitors: on-the-go playlist creation, a hunk of storage space (4 GB), and in many ways, surpassing them (having an ebook reader, for instance.) But the important thing is what this mp3 player doesn’t have that other market players do, namely, a battery that dies when you have an unexpected 6-hour layover. The media player is entirely hand-powered: simply crank it up and you are rewarded with playback. Specifically, a minute of winding gets you up to 45 minutes of use, according to their website. No outlets, cords or batteries required (except of course, to actually put music on it.) Perhaps this players greatest downfall is that it’s not an iPod, lacking its irresistible interface and sleek build, but we bet if Apple and the Eco Media Player joined forces we would never have a conversation on public transportation again. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing we’ll leave to you to decide.
A pen that’ll last through two presidents (almost.)
The Swiss have given us some long-lasting items over the years (Sigg water bottles, Swiss Army Knives), and we’re about to add another to the list. The Seven Year Pen, a collaboration between Swiss pen company Prodir and New York-based design company Seltzer, is just that: a pen whose ink supply lasts for seven years. According to the sites figures, that permits 1.7 meters of writing a day. Whether this includes full sentences or a vertical stack of single characters doesn’t much matter to us, as most of our heavy-duty writing is done on a keyboard these days, pens reserved for ever-essential train-doodling, journaling and illegible to-do lists. Either way, that’s a lot of ink. The idea behind the pen was to reduce waste. 100 million pens are discarded every day, Seltzer says, so why not make pens that last longer? Makes perfect sense to us. To sweeten the deal, the pens are really cute, and they don’t have that super liquid ink that has exploded all over our hands on airplanes way too many times.
Recyclable headphones. (via MoCo Loco)
Trying to visit the website where these headphones are sold is a rather frustrating user experience. Add to that, these lovely looking ear accessories are only sold at Parisian shop Colette. Oh, and they’re sold out. However, onto Recycling.
UK and Hong Kong-based designer Michael Young collaborated with EOps, a music technology brand to create these Noisezero O+ Eco Edition over the ear headphones. The materials used to create the Noisezeros include recyclable stainless steel, aluminum and “cornstarch bio-plastics.” The debate about the effectiveness of corn-related plastics in battling our dependency on petroleum rages on across the internet, but one thing is for sure, we certainly don’t need any more of it. If someone wants to use it to make a pair of stylish, sleek headphones and keep it out of our breakfast cereal, that can’t be a terrible thing.
All images are copyright of their creators. Sources are in alt text.
