Tuesday, August 18, 2009

District 9: Could extraterrestrial Zabaleen make spaceships out of recycled scrap materials? Can we?

The raw materials for creating sophisticated hi-tech, high value items need not come from tantalum and niobium mines in African rain forests, or from uranium mines in India or Australia, Bauxite/Aluminum mines in the Amazon, or from lithium salts in the Atacama desert. Most of the materials we need for a great future can be found in our "waste streams" -- in our so-called "garbage". Zabaleen understand this, and apparently so do the film-makers who made "District 9".


Solar CITES associate and Di Massa Utility Consulting team member Alvaro Silva and I went to see Dsitrict 9 the other night after working on the Sonoma County Water Agency Regional Geothermal Energy Exchange promotional video. We went to see this important film at the Sonoma County Airport Cinema, next door to the SCWA, delighting in the fact that this movieplex will soon be on the waste-water cooled regional geo-thermal energy exchange network. The Airport Cinimea has a visionary owner and will soon be a best practice demonstration movie complex that will air condition and heat its theaters in a revolutionary climate friendly way using renewables. Even the parking lots at this business park are wonderful; next door they have a PV powered parking lot with electric vehicle charging stations! . I told my Solar CITIES partner and wife Sybille about the ideas in District 9 and she said, "definitely not an American film, very sophisticated."

It is indeed an important film; interesting to see it through the optic of working with trash recyclers and knowing the prejudice those who turn what we call garbage into value added items face. Perhaps our next step in Solar CITIES should be to build a spaceship out of recycled materials, like the "prawns"...

No comments: