Sprout Rainbow pencils underline the sustainable agenda in British tech adventure
The Earth’s population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050. Will there be enough food? How do we meet the challenge of feeding the rapidly growing population in the future?
This is a concern that Liberty Produce, a British farming technology company, is working to solve with their fully controlled, indoor vertical farming system.
Together with the UK government and a range of research institutes, Liberty Produce launched their Future Farming Hub project in Dundee, Scotland in October 2019. All the guests including growers, retailers, press and government officials received a Sprout Rainbow pencil at the registration desk.
Why? To highlight the importance of sustainability in every detail that this project holds. And to keep the conversation going in a fun, surprising and engaging way.
A container full of growing plants
So, what’s vertical farming about? Imagine a shipping container filled with plants grown in stacked layers of plant beds lit by powerful LED bulbs.
This is what the future of agriculture looks like according to Liberty Produce. Their mission is to drive innovation that will enable the world population to meet global crop requirements without harming the planet.
Vertical farming uses less water and allows more food to be grown in a smaller space because the “fields” go up rather than outwards. It also enables the growth of local produce year-round, and allows the crops to grow without being dependent on whether conditions, quality of local soil and the use of pesticides. Vertical farming is not yet sustainable, the Future Farming Hub exists to lead the research and development of technologies which will ensure that it becomes so in the near future.
If any merchandise at all, it’s got to be sustainable
Liberty Produce runs and attends a wide variety of events, so they discussed the need for promotional merchandise to hand out on these occasions. One thing was clear; if they used merchandise at all, it had to be sustainable.
“Having sustainability as an overarching goal, we carefully consider whether we need promotional merchandise and make our decisions based on how sustainable we believe a product is. We even have a scoring system that includes sustainability as a category. When we found the Sprout pencils, we thought they were a good match. Being plantable and 100% sustainable they met all our criteria,” Zeina Chapman, co-Director of Liberty Produce explains.
They ran a big launch event in Scotland in October 2019 and kept the Rainbow Sprout pencils at the registration desk. A broad range of delegates (including growers, retailers, press and government officials) attended the event and they gave a huge amount of positive feedback on the pencils.
“We had a huge amount of positive feedback on the pencils. They became a talking point amongst the delegates, particularly when they realized they weren’t all the same and there was a range of seeds available – a number of people returned to the registration desk to request the full set!”
The Sprout Rainbow pencil is a 100% natural pencil with three colors in one. It contains a capsule with seeds at the end and will grow into herbs, vegetables or flowers when it’s planted. This way, it becomes a symbol of sustainability because it gets a new life when it’s too short to color with.