Since I left Ascendia at the end of March I've been pretty quiet on the blog and twitter.  The reason is pretty simple, worried that setting out on my own I would find myself without work and income, I filled my schedule.  The result of this is that I have been busier, and more productive than I have for a quite a while. In order to cope, I temporary shut down my blog writing processes and focused.  Now that I have a bit of (short lived) breather before the next group of projects kick in, it is time to reboot my blog writing.  The resulting silence as caused some concern among my friends and I apologize for that.

The first project I became involved in is Carbon Cube. This is a tie up with the town of Oguni in Kumamoto to provide easily purchased, tangible, and verifiable carbon credits through tree planting.  Many credits or environmental tree planting programs are rightly viewed with suspicion.  Often the money is provided, but trees are either never planted, neglected and soon die off, or planted but then soon cut down.  This is money that could have been used elsewhere, provididing no real benefit other than to enrich those running said schemes.

With CarbonCube we provide through our website visual firm confirmation that the money provided is actually being used to plant and maintain the forest in a sustainable and responsible manner.  One carboncube can purchased for 500 yen (a little over 5 dollars US).  That 500 yen is then used to 1 purchase a seedling, and provide for continuing forest maintenance by the Oguni forestry association, creating a photographic and GPS record of where and when the seedling was planted, and for the creation of the cube and the basic running of the website itself. 

Plans are in the works for offering carboncubes at transportation hubs such as airports and highway rest areas, prefectural offices and shops , etc.  They are also being offered to corporations that purchase carbon credits from Oguni, which the corporations can in turn give to their customers as visible and verifiable proof of the corporation's green efforts.