Green Dragon’s Den comes to Birmingham

• Mar. 2 by Hanna Tidd (1)

The panel included Jeremy Piercy, the founder and MD of Shared Earth; Rianne Ten Veen, the founder of Green Creation and Professor Rex Harris, a professor for the University of Birmingham and the inventor of hydrogen as fuel.

A Simple Cure For The Plastic Bag Plague

The event’s organiser, Malcolm Currie, was the first person to slay the Dragons with his “Turtle Bag” concept.

Currie’s animated presentation explained to the young crowd the dangers that plastic bags have to the environment – specifically the threat to turtles in Sri Lanka. The audience were particularly responsive to an image of a turtle trapped inside a plastic bag, many of the children raised there hands to ask what they could do to prevent this.

Currie then presented the eco-friendly product which is made using natural fibres and offers an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic bags.

He went on to explain that one of the main reasons that people use plastic bags is because they do not always know when they are going shopping, so they often do not have a sustainable alternative method to hand; the innovative design of The Turtle Bag combats this problem because it can be folded up into a small ball and is easily transportable.

The bags themselves are made in Sri Lanka using sustainable material and cost £3. The concept received unanimous praise from the panel.

Rianne Ten Veen joked: “How on Earth did we manage to survive as a species without plastic bags?  We use 13 billion plastic bags a year. We don’t need to, not with products like the Turtle Bag. Very well done.”

Revolver Records Release Eco T-shirt Range

The second person to face the dragons was Paul Birch, the managing director of Revolver Records and founder of Revolver Worlds, a company that specialises in Fairtrade t-shirts. Birch used the companies slogan, “…where clothing doesn’t have to cost the earth” to sum up the product; a sustainable and eco-friendly range of t-shirts that is also cheap to buy.

Birch also compared his product to the Fairtrade t-shirts manufactured by Marks & Spencers and revealed that their products are not 100% fair trade, as it is only the cotton that is fairtrade and not the production method. He also stated that because Revolver Records market their t-shirts through the Co-op, they are sold in recyclable boxes which cuts down on production time and explains why the price is so low.

The t-shirts come in a range of different sizes and designs, and are available at £5 each. Birch received praise from the panel for keeping every aspect of the production line ethical and eco-friendly, and at a low and affordable price.

You’re Never Too Young To Recycle Your City

Mauth Aldabbagh was the final person to present to the Dragons (and he was also at the Extra Green Drinks later in the evening). The teenager from Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, told the audience his inspiring story of how he introduced recycling into the town.

Aldabbagh revealed that when a friend of his discovered that there wasn’t any facilities to recycle waste, they formed a group on Facebook in March 2008 to raise the issue to others.

The campaign soon built up strength and is now a multi-million pound organisation called Recycle Your City. The campaign aims to solve urban solid waste management problems by promoting recycling as an alternative to dumping.

Jeremy Piercy said:

“It’s stories like that that are truly inspiring. It is so very important for young people to get involved with environmental issues because they are the future. I think today has proved that.”