Eco friendly biodegradable tape.
Everybody uses adhesive tape, and tape is truly a smart invention. However, the common sticky tape has some drawbacks. The first and foremost being that it is made of plastic. Plastic is made from oil. And oil... well, have you filled up your car recently? But (and here comes the good part) there are alternatives available. This tape, for instance. This is Sellotape Original and it is cellulose tape, i.e. it is made using wood pulp. This means the tape is manufactured using a renewable resource, and that it is biodegradable. If this particular brand of tape is available in Sweden, we do not know; we have not been able to find it at Svanströms, for instance. Instead we found this at the British WWF Online Shop via Hippy Shopper and WWF wants GBP 3:- (ca SEK 40:-) a roll.
5 October 2005
Swedish fire steel fire starter.
It is marketed as the Swedish FireSteel and it was developed and designed by and for the Swedish Department of Defense, who wanted personnel in the field to be equipped with an easy and sure way of making fire regardless of weather, altitude and adverse conditions. The steel and magnesium of the FireSteel firestarter gives a very hot (+3.000°C or +5,400°F) spark that ignites grass, paper, tinder, etc even though it rains or snows. The spark is so bright it can also be used as an emergency signal. It is available at several shops, among them Friluft.se where the FireSteel model above (good for some 12,000 ignitions) is SEK 175:- (USD 22:40) including a tin of Maya Dust igniting wood. From Light my fire.
4 October 2005
Eco stain remover?
One day during the past summer we happened upon a street vendor with a talent for mime. This was possibly due to his nonexistent command of the Swedish language, but the mime was fine; we got the message all right. The guy was selling these little bottles of stain remover, branded Natur Clean Star (sic). He did an excellent demo of his product, smearing his white shirt and pants with grease, oil, strawberry jam, wine and coffee, and removing stains with his product. He did this time after time, and after each cleaning he sold box after box of the little bottles. They were SEK 60:- (approx. USD 7:-) a piece (two for 100:-), if we are not mistaken. Of course we bought two to take home and try. And they work. At least on light colored clothes and at least on stains from coffee, wine, fat, gravy and raspberry. Why it works we do not know. We simply do not know enough chemistry to explain. (Wish we could translate the list of contents into English, but our grade school chemistry classes did not cover this. Sorry.) Natur Clean Star phone. +46 8 739 55 31 58
2 October 2005
Light, foldable wheel barrow.
It is actually called Better-Than-a-Barrow, so the guys at Herrington must obviously think it is not a wheelbarrow. But we do not work at Herrington, so we are going to call it a wheel barrow anyway. Because that is what we think it is, albeit smarter than your average garden variety (pun intended) wheel barrow. The BTaB is easier to load with leaves and such. You just rake them in. Thanks to its low weight, you can also load up with more stuff (it can take up to 350 lb. or about 150 kg), and thanks to the foldability you can store it hanging on the garage wall if you like. Other wheel barrows spend most of their off duty hours in the yard, quietly rusting away. The BTaB is available at Herrington for USD 129:95.
1 October 2005
October news on Smart Stuff.
Welcome to Smart Stuff issue #10. From this month we are going to make some changes to the site.
• As you may have noticed, we are going back to black text. We thought the gray was fine, but we have received mail from several people telling us the gray is hard to read and that black was better. We knew that, but when you dear readers speak, we listen and act. Black is back.
• We are discontinuing the UNTRIED category. The page was getting large and hard to manage, and we do not think it had enough readership to justify the storage space and the bandwidth. The posts on "Untried" is available at two other places on the site; both under the appropriate category and the month it was first posted. We do not think this change will cause any trouble; we will be as clear with what products we have not tried as ever before. We hope you like the page and we also hope you will stay with us during the month to come. We can promise you a lot of exciting stuff...
1 October 2005
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