GreenUps: MeetUp with a bit of Green

I went along to my first GreenUp on Tuesday night, a meeting for people who are interested in meeting other Green minded folk. I found myself in a beautiful design exhibition in the Muse Gallery in Ultimo, surrounded by interesting intelligent people talking passionately about environmental sustainability.

GreenUps is a group who meet for drinks once a month to talk about the environment and sustainability, organised via MeetUps. MeetUps is a free website service that connects people, not just online, but actually enabling you to join a group of like minded to folk to meet – wait for it – in person. There are all sorts of groups and anyone can start one – some just meet for dinner, there are book clubs and sports groups and others are about political causes.

With that in mind, I was very impressed by the quality of the event put on by GreenUps. It was a free event, asking for a gold coin donation – for which there was a generous spread of food. Good quality wine and beer (sustainable of course) was available for around $5 a drink, plus your business card in a draw for a lucky door prize (which I was very disappointed I didn’t win – gorgeous T-Shirts from Moral Fibre). Once I was fed and watered, I had a wander round and perused the exhibition at the Muse Gallery, a great design exhibition put on by the TAFE in Ultimo. The theme for this months GreenUp was Sustainable Design, hence the location. This drew a good mix of people with both environmental interests and design interests.


T-Shirts from http://www.moralfibre.com/

My interest was really piqued by the speakers. It was a shame they did not provide a list of the speakers, their details were quickly flashed on a screen, it was crowded and difficult to see, and I didn’t have time to stay back to speak with them directly. I will be tracking them down to find out more though – some very interesting stuff. The first speaker, Chris spoke about ‘skinning’ buildings and his work as an architect on the highly energy efficient and visually stunning Watercube building built for the Beijing Olympics. Then we heard from Anna Lise De Lorenzo from &company, who gave some great thoughts on Responsible Design, with a wonderful example of moulded oyster shells being used to help organic oyster farmers make ‘wild’ oysters more marketable.

Oyster Shells from http://www.andcompany.com.au/

The last speaker, Andrew Simpson, I found particularly fascinating – because this was seriously cool nerdy stuff. Andrew, an industrial designer, explained how difficult it is for designers to source and compare sustainable materials. For a time he was forced to do traditional industrial design work, but in parallel now has a business called Best Practice Plastics who specialise in the injection moulding of sustainable materials. Andrew talked about 3D printing, which – as I understood it with my lay persons brain – enables you to take a 3D picture of something you wish to manufacture, then Andrew’s team do their magic and use this technology thingy to produce – or ‘print in 3D’ an object that matches the form you captured. Trust me it was cool.


http://www.bestpracticeplastics.com/

Cool pretty much sums up my first experience of GreenUps. I came away excited by the heap of cool sustainable stuff going on out there, and realising I have a lot more to learn. I look forward to the next GreenUp to see what further treasures can be uncovered.

Tweet