5 Ways to green your Christmas with 200 people. greendrinks Tokyo Xmas Party Report !

• charity
• eneloop
• greendrinks
• social action

By Luke PoliszcukDec 18th, 2009

The lucky winners of great Christmas prizes display their bounty!

It’s time for Christmas. It’s time when everybody thinks how they can spend a fun, entertaining and warm time with friends and families. But it’s also a time to re-think how fortunate we are to be able to celebrate this happiness. So we decided to throw not just an ordinary Christmas party but something that would be meaningful anfd fulfilling to many people. At greenz.jp, we held the green drinks Tokyo Xmas Special kindly supported by Sanyo Electric’s eneloop universe series and was reported to be the greenest Christmas event in Tokyo.

So why was this event so Green? Here are just some of the reasons, incorporating Japanese traditional “Mottainai (waste not ) values and aesthetics merged with technology and the spirit of ecology. Over 200 people showed up and the venue was packed with Tokyo’s Green Leaders and key green companies from across Japan. Photos from the party are viewable HERE.

The event kicked off with an explanation of the international green drinks movement. Held in over 600 cities worldwide, green drinks is truly international and greenz.jp has been hosting greendrinks Tokyo every month since Septemeber 2007. Then in the spirit of the Greenest Xmas, we talked about our 5 Green Xmas Hack tips.

Green Hack 1 ; REUSE.

The event kicked off to a great start thanks to the eneloop team

The eneloop leader and head of the advanced design center at Sanyo Electric, Masato Shimizu, explained that eneloop was not just about batteries. The eneloop universe of products is a series of “sustainable” products that were created based on the eneloop rechargeable battery, a revolutionary Nickel-metal hydride rechargeable battery launched in November 2005 that combined the benefits of traditional dry cell batteries with rechargeable, coming pre-charged out of the package and able to be recharged up to 1,000 times!. The line-up of eneloop portable solar generating products are all power producers in their own right and guests were able to charge their mobile phones using the solar charge packs, really bringing home the benefits of energy from the sun.

A mobile phone charging station set up with an eneloop solar charger

To demonstrate the effectiveness of these eneloop universe rechargeable batteries, funky jazz guitarist Jiro Yoshida used the batteries for his live performance and had everyone grooving.

The funky tunes of jazz guitarist Jiro Yoshida blew everyone away!

Notice how small and portable these eneloop universe products are! But they are really powerful!

The photo above is an eneloop universe charger pack that is being used to power the guitar amp used on the day by Jiro Yoshida. When we saw these demonstration packs at the Eco-Products Exhibition recently we jumped at the chance to be able to use test them out. Imagine a city full of buskers playing to live audiences using only solar power! And imagine how these could be really handy in case of natural disasters such as earthquakes when electricties and major infrastructures are damaged. Talking about survivability !

Green Hack 2 ; INNOVATION

The power generating floor beneath the Christmas Tree

No Christmas is complete without a Christmas Tree, and the green LED lights on our tree were lit up with people power from the power generating floor. No oil or gas used and zero emissions! As previously introduced in our post HERE, Soundpower Corporation’s power generating floors create energy when compressed, so with a little jig you could light up the whole tree. This Japanese venture corporation is picking up a lot of international attention. While a lot of people there had heard about this innovation at Shibuya’s Hachiko Square, major train stations and floor-powered club events, actually jumping on board and creating their own energy was so exciting that the lights stayed on all night.

Green Hack 3 ; GIVING

Christmas Is All About Giving. The Christmas cakes on the day were purchased from the World Vision Japan Love Cake Project, via Allegresse HIROO and Chez Matsuo supporting poverty-stricken children. The missing slice from the whole cake symbolizes that the piece is for someone else – children in need and in poverty. We featured a guest speaker from World Vision Japan to discuss the project and took a moment to think about these children in serious hunger, poverty and bad health conditions and who may not even know about Christmas. 5% of proceeds on the day were donated to World Vision Japan too.

From left: Guest speakers Imamura, Okazaki, and greenz.jp's YOSH

The missing slices in all these cakes goes to supporting children around the world!

Green Hack 4; SHARE

It’s a great feeling to share what you have with others.
Everyone participated in the Christmas tree decoration with their own ornaments. The tree was rented, ornaments collected will be exchanged at this weekend’s flea market and the left over of the ornaments will be donated to children’s charity. By sharing, we can have fun but also provoke environmentally and socially responsible behaviors.

And the AR Brothers world’s first “AR (augmented reality)” Christmas cards blew everyone’s minds.

The world's first Altered Reality Christmas card

This AR Christmas cards from the AR Brothers provide real-world information through a world-view lens. By holding up the normally blank cards to the UStream lens you could see Twitter messages playing in real-time across the paper. This was about sharing the vibe and the moment, not only with the crowd but with greenz fans across Japan who couldn’t make it to the party. We provided ways for people to plug in wherever they were and people participated in the #gdX Twitter stream or viewed the UStream channels live. Although technology can never replace the real face to face communications, these interactive innovations could be leveraged to engage the mass.

Green Hack 5; FUN, FUN, FUN!

One of the crucial keys to sustainability is to have fun. And often
the quickest(and easiest) way to engage people and increase sustainable practioners is to offer entertaning incentives. Everyone loves getting presents so we provided the hottest green gifts and gadgets.

4 lucky winners received these packs of pastel-crayon eneloop tones

The green drinks Tokyo Xmas Special was kindly supported by Sanyo Electric Corporation’s team of eneloop Christmas elves who brought presents of eneloop tones multi-colored rechargeable batteries and eneloop charger sets. The eneloop universe exhibition drew a real crowd. Featuring products such as the brand new pastel eneloop tones, faintly reminiscent of children’s crayons (so hard to get now), the solar lantern bringing light to the children of Uganda (read our stories HERE), and the eneloop lamp, everyone was wowed.

AR Christmas Cards and eneloop tones

At the reception, attendess were given AR Christmas Cards, Macrobiotic scones as giveaways and eneloop tones was won by @trickandtrap through our reTweet contest!!

The grand finale, of course, was the Green Gift Giving! 3 people received greenz.jp prizes consisting of ethical fashion item,“Miminho Slippers” and social design product “Flowerpot”from Think the Earth Social Design Market (read our previous post about the flowerpot HERE)

The dress code for the evening was of course- green. Check out some of the best green dressers.

Beautiful and funky green dressers

Can you believe this? It's a RING!

Everyone seemed soothed by the soft green colors

And a big thanks to all for their support and of course to the Tokyo Family Restaurant for providing such a great venue for our Greenest Christmas, also dressed in green! The multinational food and drinks were perfectly arranged.

The Tokyo Family Restaurant staff hard at work

That brought us to the end of the green drinks Tokyo Xmas Special. Our thanks go out to all those in live and virtual attendance, the staff and volunteers on the day, and to our sponsors Sanyo Electric.

Lively discussions raged inside..

green drinks will continue to be held every second Thursday each month, so make sure to drop by check out greendrinks Tokyo for updates (Photos from past events are viewable HERE).

Thanks and Merry Green Christmas!

Translated by Luke Poliszcuk from the original Japanese post by YOSH (2009/12/18)