About a decade ago, I bumped into Simon Daniel on a station platform. Simon and I been in the same year at Uni in the early 1990s, but hadn’t seen each other in the meantime. We’d both been at the same event, the sadly defunct Low Carbon Best Practice Exchange, and he showed me what he had been promoting there on behalf of his company Moixa – a rechargeable AA battery which you plugged into a USB port. “Oh, that’s a clever idea!” I said, being polite, as my mind was going “Who’d ever want to recharge stuff via a USB port?”

How wrong I was, of course. Just this weekend I’ve been recharging my Garmin watch, my iPhone, my front bike light and my new bluetooth speaker via a USB port. What’s great from a Sustainability point of view is a. all of these gadgets are rechargeable, cutting the use of single-use batteries, and b. only the iPhone came with its own charger (which I used to charge all the other items) so a whole bunch of other eWaste has been avoided. The drawer of random battery chargers has not had a new addition in many years. The lightweighting of life continues.

While I have dedicated the last 20 years of my life promoting change for Sustainability, it takes the real innovators like Simon to see the logical progression of technology and behaviour and how they can combine to create new ideas which quickly become standard practice. More power to their collective elbows!

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