The 2008 Bundaberg World Environment Day Celebration will be like nothing this town has ever seen! Here's the latest:

Part of moving towards a low-carbon lifestyle includes using smart housing design, like using natural sunrays to light your home. Hot off the presses: attendees at the W.E.D. celebration will have an opportunity to win a Solatube 250mm skylight, fully installed in their home, from Allsafe Energy Efficient Products - valued at $500! Free light..... Now that has to be a good thing! We thank Allsafe for their sponsorship and their excellent contribution to World Environment Day!

Bundaberg Regional Council is participating in MobileMuster's "Old Phones, More Trees" campaign, running from now until World Environment Day. This is following on from last year's "Old Phones, New Trees" campaign, where a native tree will be planted for every mobile phone handed in for recycling. Last year was very successful with 75,000 trees scheduled for planting across Australia! Since the CDMA network has just shut down, this is a great time to recycle your old phone - bring it with you to the drop off point at W.E.D at the PCYC on June 1st !

In your travels around town, have you seen the premier issue of Naturechain Magazine? Check the local newsagents or Nana's Pantry- if they haven't already run out! It's the free tabloid size magazine with the smiling little boy holding a bag of seedlings on the front cover, an excellent article by organic gardening author Jackie French inside, and the colourful W.E.D. ad splashed over the entire back cover!

Finally, earlier this week Dean and I visited the 93.1 Sea FM studios on Woondooma St. - we had lunch with station manager Trish Mears, then I voiced a 30 second commercial for World Environment Day with promotions director Liana Lambert. It's been nearly 3 years since I left the commercial radio industry in Atlanta, where voicing and producing commercials was what I did for a living - but it was like riding a bike, and I did it in only two takes! Click here to hear the fully produced spot. Thanks Liana! Next week I'll pop in and add one last line about the Allsafe skylight giveaway. Listen to 93.1 Sea FM, where you'll hear the spot air beginning May 19th.

Whew! More as it happens!

World Environment Day is progressing nicely! We've secured a sponsorship deal with Naturechain Magazine - look for our full page ad in their inaugural issue, coming out in the first week of May, and look for the Naturechain stall at the WED celebration! They've also been kind enough to allow us to use the ad as a flyer. You can download it here - feel free to distribute it amongst your email networks! If you'd like to print and distribute it, you'll need to set your printer to size it to fit the paper, as it's tabloid size. There is also a preliminary schedule that can be printed on the back of the flyer as a standard A4 - click here to download. Please note, the Naturechain ad/flyer is not approved to appear in any other print publication.

Naturechain is the Fraser Coast region's 1st Environmental and Cultural themed publication. It's a free monthly full colour magazine that will be home delivered to 16,000 homes in Hervey Bay, 3,000 bulk dropped between the Bay and Gympie and an additional 1,000 bulk dropped between the Bay and Bundaberg. They are covering a huge range of topics like Aboriginal Culture, Green Investing, Zoology, Biology, Water Wise Homes and Gardens, Energy Alternatives, Fishing and Camping, Natural Health and Beauty, Sustainable Building and Living and the list goes on and on. This publication has been designed as a educational collectable series, trying to make people more aware of the environment around them and the little things they can be doing to not only enjoy its natural beauty but preserve it for future generations to come.

In other news, we're in talks to put together a promotional bus route so people don't have to drive to/from World Environment Day, and hopefully we'll also have the library set up as a meeting place for people to walk to WED together! More on both of these developments as details become available!

Bundaberg's 2008 World Environment Day Celebration is officially on! Ann has booked the PCYC complex for Sunday, 1st June from 8am to 5pm. I submitted a proposal to council (through Shane Hatton, the current council events development officer) requesting their participation and support. In a conversation with James Stanfield from Bundaberg Waste Management, he told me he's happy to participate as a speaker and we even talked about having the waste services truck and a bunch of mulch onsite!

Dean and I attended the community garden committee meeting last night and had an opportunity to mention the event to Christine, and to Angela from BCD, and both groups are keen to be involved. Today I'll contact all the other green groups in the region and see if they'd like to participate, then we'll send out sponsorship proposals.

In further conversations Ann also suggested the idea of senior school students debating on issues of sustainability, biofuels, etc as a companion event.

The ideas are really starting to come together - very shortly it will be necessary to have a WED2008 meeting to advance these ideas into reality! Feel free to reply and let us know how you would like to contribute to WED2008.

Andi Hazelwood
SustainaBundy