Refrigeration Without the Refrigerator

I read about a device that a young British woman purportedly recently invented. There was a link to it on a favourite French language blog of mine. You basically stick a metal cylinder inside another sort of cylinder, fill the gap between them with sand and wet that sand, and the water's evaporation (from the sun) keeps the inside cylinder cold enough to hold perishables for several days. All you need to do to keep it going is add more water to the sand. You can read the original piece about it in the Daily Mail here.

The thing is that this is far from being some revolutionary invention. Zeer pots have been around for a while and use the same passive cooling process using two pots. I looked for them here on the amazing AfriGadget website (you wanna talk about innovation and sustainability -- check them out) but couldn't find them. Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian teacher, has been credited with their invention on numerous websites.

Reducing and reusing creatively and a few other finds

I like checking out DIY and crafts sites or blogs -- especially their posts or articles on environmentally-friendly creations. There are a lot of original ideas to be found that make being practical sorta fun.

For instance, here's a step-by-step guide to how to make your own reusable sandwich wrapper. You need some basic sewing skills to do it, obviously, but it's something that wouldn't be difficult to learn (and would have wider applications than merely making a bunch of reusable sandwich wrappers).

Then I stumbled upon instructions for making a solar food dryer. There are lots of these all over the internet and there are even more for solar cookers (with everything from satellite dishes to pizza boxes incorporated into the designs).

And then there's a lot of buzz about Zeer pots, which are refrigerating earthenware pots (you put a terra cotta pot into a larger terra cotta pot, slip sand in between then and keep it wet -- the evaporation of the water cools the inner pot).

Oh, and if you're like me and you have boxes and boxes of old VHS tapes in your shed, attic or basement -- here are some instructions on how to make a totebag using tape from them. The My Recycled Bags.com site has tons of neat blurbs on how to make bags out of just about anything, by the way. Very neat! (Do people still say 'neat'?)