No ordinary bicycle for me at Burning Man this year - instead I got to trial a Diggler Elite: a rugged, well-sprung, all-terrain electric scooter.  The dirt on the playa varies according to the weather and usage - towards the end of the week it is heavy soft sand, when a water truck passes it is inpenetrable mud, and for the rest of the time its generally hardpacked but with sneaky pits of soft stuff to bog the unsuspecting cyclist distracted by sculpture and spectacle.
I was able to successfully Diggle in all but the wettest mud and it was FUN - the electric battery charges up fairly fast - which is lucky becos the scooter itself, laden with old-skool batteries - is no fun to push.  The hub mounted motor pushes out 750 watts and best of all the Diggler glides for ages - at least 120 metres on the playa - which not only saves power but is really exciting.  It was invented to replicate the sensation of skiing, snowboarding and mountainbiking in a human/motor all-terrain hybrid.  Get down low over the superwide handlebars, thumb on the throttle, and gliding across the wide open playa is laugh-out-loud fun!

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that a friend will be importing Digglers to Australia....and you can imagine my frustration when, in writing my review for the DRIVE section of Fairfax papers, I realized that these "two wheeled recreational devices" are banned from all public roads and footpaths...along with Segways!  Since Segway technology and similar balancing innovations form the core of many new concepts for urban commuter propulsion - like the GM/Segway P.U.M.A. project and others - I am curious as to how Australia is planning to implement sustainable transport strategies into its cities.  Not all of us want to hike up our work gear and ride a bike - sometimes a stand-up option makes way more sense.  I have just written a fairly chunky review/criticism for Fairfax which will run in their Drive Bike liftout soon.  Stay tuned for fallout!

I am almost ready to launch a new range of consumer products and I have been obsessed with containing them in recycled content plastic bottles.  It seems crazy not to be using recycled plastic when the contents are not for consumption...and even more crazy that I cant find any suppliers of such bottles in Australia.  BUT I have just found a company in the USA who can do up to 100% recycled HDPE content in opaque white bottles - and if I have my way it will start a similar trend down under.
Another curious observation about dealing with the packaging industry - many of the sales people seem to be repeating a tired and generally incorrect line: that bottles cannot be recycled if they have paper labels on them.  Bizarre if you just stop to think that in order to melt the plastic into reusable pellets it needs to be heated to way higher than the burn temperture of plastic.....
Anyhoo on my internet trawling to seek out kindred green bottle companies I came across Mike Biddle, "The Garbage Man" who has cut across the confusion by using mining industry high tech to efficiently sort and recycle plastic waste and "fluff".  Check out his TED talk here: