When Green is the new cool

Of course, being environmentally friendly is ever so trendy these day, isn’t it?
Tell a Greenie that you don’t recycle and they look at you in the same way that a normal person might if you were something they’d accidentally trodden in at the local park.
Mention that you like to eat meat and you might as well have said that you stab kittens with kebab skewers in your leisure time.
Which, of course, is nonsense: kittens are rubbish for kebabs – no meat at all.

Then there’s the whole oil thing.  The hypocrisy of your typical lentil-muncher lecturing you about BP and the Gulf of Mexico then popping off to meditation class in their dirty 2CV or VW Beetle, whale-song pouring out of the stereo, filthy diesel fumes pouring out of the back.

And don’t even get me started on the bloody dolphins.

To me, environmentalism is very much like religion: I’m happy for you to think what you want as long as you don’t try to force your views on me or my kids. Sure, we can debate your choice of lifestyle if you wish, but at the end of it, that’s exactly what it is: your choice of lifestyle – not mine.

Of course I do appreciate the sense in caring for our environment. Just not to the point where I have to ruin what short time I have on this earth so that some Patagonian sea snail can continue to exist. There’s a reason that humans are top of the food chain, alright?
I do recycle, I do watch my consumption of electricity and water, I don’t eat kitten kebabs, but I do these things because there’s a logic reason behind it (provides money for a local charity, keeps my bills down, not very filling), not because it’s trendy.

But now, trendiness and environmentalism have come together in the right sort of way with this waste-to-energy station due to built in Denmark.

Yes, this particular waste to energy plant has 1,500m of ski slopes going down it and it also blows smoke rings.
And no ordinary smoke rings, either:

At night the smoke rings will be lit up by heat-tracking lasers able to project a pie-chart onto the smoke that displays a quota of fossil-fuel CO2.
The designers explain: “The rather abstract pollution aspect will be somewhat more graspable and understandable, something you can see and relate to. The smoke rings are spectacular and highly aesthetical, but linked to a controversial theme at the same time.”

There’s a serious point here. These sort of ideas could help to define a whole new sort of cool when it comes to looking after the environment. Rather than solely being the haunt of unwashed hippies, it brings the cutting edge of modern design to the green agenda; it will appeal to a whole new group of individuals, which can only be good news for mother earth and those sea snails.

And it blows smoke rings.