tom said:
"Can we start by addressing some of the Urban Legends?
Myth: CFL bulbs are full of mercury and you can't throw them away and they will kill ..." [read]
bmorningstar said:
"Just before reading this article, I had the notion that perhaps the electron transport chain of photosynthesis is less that perfect~ which I found ..." [read]
dweller said:
"32 bucks a panel? When will these be at the home depot?..." [read]
Jonathan said:
"If the Dragon station is just stealing energy from the trucks, it seems a lot more efficient to use a system optimized for the engine. A truck com..." [read]
Eric said:
"The principal does not care about the price of gas - if the cost of buses increases, they'll simply raise property taxes. It's good that these kid..." [read]
abe said:
"hey-- a simpler way to free mice from glue traps is with some water and cooking oil-- just stay away from the little guy's face, and put on some pl..." [read]
Visitors to the Olympics in Beijing this summer can look forward to more than just history's largest sporting event and biggest national coming-out party (or, if you prefer, biggest airport or longest bridge). They'll also be able to glimpse the world's largest color LED display combined with China's first photovoltaic system to be integrated into a glass curtain wall. The GreenPix Zero Energy Media Wall, designed by New York-based architect Simone Giostra with solar technology by China's solar powerhouse Suntech, will form the curtain wall of the Xicui Entertainment Complex in Beijing, harvesting solar energy by day and using it to illuminate the screen after dark, mirroring a day’s climatic cycle.
PICTURED: Kelly Rutherford-PHOTO by: Albert Ferreira/startraksphoto.com
17 percent surveyed by Sylvania would skip sex if they didn't have to change a lightbulb for over ten years.
We're no fans of abstinence campaigns, but okay you other 83% percent, it's not a lot to ask to help out with things environmental. To tell the truth, no sacrifice is required -- you can have your green lovin' and not have change your lightbulb too, that is, after an initial change to a long-lasting CFL. The folks at Sylvania may have made that a more attractive proposition, perhaps not as attractive as these CFLs Collin told you about (yum!), with their new line of Micro-mini bulbs that the lovely Kelly Rutherford, star of the hit drama Gossip Girl, introduced on Earth Day.
Put down that red pencil, editor Meg, that is not a typo. Dutch designer Pieke Bergmans puts LEDs into hand blown crystal light blubs, shown in Milan this month. She says:
"You may wonder: What is a light blub?? The answer is simple: it is a light bulb that has gone way out of line. Infected by the dreaded Design Virus, these Blubs have taken on all kinds of forms and sizes you wouldn’t expect from such well behaving and reliable little products."
Dezeen Reports that "The Light Blubs are a series of crystal lamps, designed by Pieke Bergmans, in cooperation with Royal Crystal Leerdam. The lamps are all unique handcrafted crystal pieces, equipped with leds by Solid Lighting Design.
The focus of Pieke Bergmans latest projects lies on creating products which are all slightly different, though they were made in a set process. The term ‘Perfect Imperfection’ illustrates the qualities that such a product can attain."
Whenever we peddle the virtues of compact fluorescents, we get the same complaints about either the mercury and the quality of light. People take it so seriously that politicians actually propose the "Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act"
The Energy Saving Trust in the UK was having none of it, and set up a sort of Pepsi challenge to see if people really could tell them apart. Smart Planet reports "Although 70 per cent of the 761 shoppers that were asked to step inside the booths thought they could spot the difference, 53 per cent got it wrong or admitted they couldn't see any difference. A whopping 64 per cent of the guinea pigs said they preferred the light in booth A, which was in fact the energy-saving lightbulb." ::Smart Planet
Back in 2007, our post on a 9W LED replacement for a 70W incandescent generated a huge amount of interest and debate. While some were excited to see the dawn of a new lighting technology, others felt it was overpriced and under-powered, in terms of lumen output. We wonder, then, what our readership will make of the new EvoLux 13W LED bulb, which the manufacturers claim will replace a 100W incandescent, or a 13W CFL, and can apparently last as long as 50,000 hours (for comparison purposes, this CFL manufacturer claims that an incandescent will last 750 hours, and a CFL will last 10,000). The price point is still high, coming out at a whopping US$109 (though it is currently on sale for $95), but for those early adopters who just hate changing light bulbs, this might be worth a try. More from the manufacturer’s website:
Here's an interesting new way to think about energy efficiency: a study done by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University revealed that it takes between 3,000 gallons and 6,000 gallons of water to power a 60-watt incandescent bulb for 12 hours a day over the course of a year.
The researchers -- Virginia Tech professor Tamim Younos and undergraduate student Rachelle Hill -- are crunching the numbers to determine the water-efficiency of some of the most common energy sources and power generating methods. The most water-efficient energy sources are natural gas (though we may be just about out of it) and synthetic fuels produced by coal gasification; the least efficient are ethanol and biodiesel -- the biofuels just can't catch a break these days, can they?
It looks like Loop.ph, a UK-based design research studio, has (re)created the perfect tree: by day, it offers shelter from the sun: by night, it sheds light for the local community, using the energy collected in solar cells embedded in its canopy. Its name: Sonumbra. It is a ‘sonic shade of light’ as the designers Rachel Wingfield & Mathias Gmachl like to describe it.
That's what conservative pundit Michelle Malkin calls compact fluorescents, as her website writes about Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachman and her "Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act", filed appropriately in her "Enviro-nitwit" category. Although we cannot find a link to TreeHugger in it, we are getting a lot of traffic and comments, so we provide herein some background and welcome our visitors.
Oh, and here is an update: Sylvania just introduced a new CFL with only 1.5 milligrams of mercury. The 4 or 5 milligrams in a conventional CFL are barely the size of the nib of a ballpoint pen, so 1.5 milligrams is probably not even visible, let alone a major hazard. ::CNET
A lot of neat things have come out of Bletchley Park over the years; the latest is the compact, high-efficiency, microwave powered, electrodeless lamp from Ceravison, covered in TreeHugger here last summer. Unfortunately, it may be exactly the same bulb that we showed here from the American company Luxim just a few days ago. According to Smart Planet, Ceravision says that Luxim stole technology secrets from a company Ceravision bought, after being engaged to do some engineering support and signing a non-disclosure. ...
At 140 lumens/watt, these pill-sized plasma light bulbs by Luxim are a pretty awesome contender for "light of the future". They are almost 10 times more efficient than traditional incandescent light bulbs, twice as efficient as current high-end LEDs, and they also beat CFLs, most of which are around 50-80 lumens/watt. Only the prototype 300 lumens/watt nanocrystal-coated LEDs can hold a candle to them.
And the light from Luxim's LIFI bulb is not ugly either: color rendering index (CRI) is 91. Lifetime for a bulb is estimated at 20,000 hours, and a relatively large amount of power can be pumped through them, allowing a tiny bulb to produce 30,000+ lumens (not something LEDs can do)....
Combining precise control with some pretty suave looks and the efficiency of LEDs, Pablo Designs' Brazo task lamp proves we can have our cake and eat it, too. The desk lamp has 18 fully dimmable LEDs in a tube that rotates 360 degrees, meaning you can have just as much light as you want, just about wherever you want it. The super-efficient LEDs -- the exact energy consumption isn't listed, oddly -- are rated for 25,000 hours of life.
Designed by Pablo Pardo, the futuristic-looking lamp carries an equally futuristic price tag of $400 -- ouch! Being an early adopter has a price -- but we like all the different options the dimming and twisting provide. And to help reduce the sticker shock just a bit, remember that you'd probably buy and burn out 25 or 30 incandescent light bulbs in those 25,000 hours (we know, small consolation). Get all the specs [PDF] on the slick lamp, join us in waiting for the price to come down, and hit the jump to get up close and personal. ::Pablo Designs via ::Organic Spa Magazine and check out a great hands-on review over at ::Jetson Green...
It's an electroluminescent that glows when you step on it. "The glow that the rug emits is very soft," says co-inventor Leona Dean, of London South Bank University, who also noted the innovation's party applications, "It can provide ambient mood lighting or flash in time to music as a talking point at a party."
Livescience writes that Dean and another LSBU engineering student Zoe Robson developed the light-up rug, called Footlume, for a college course, and they will exhibit the innovation at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show in London this month.
Now if they could only hook it up with a piezoelectric generator dancefloor like the one at Amy Winehouse's green dance club. ::Livescience
...
Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are very promising. They are more expensive efficient than incandescents without the downsides of CFLs (fragility, mercury), and they have the potential to become less expensive than regular LEDs. Because of their thinness and flexibility, they could be used in all kinds of places (a designer's dream).
We're not quite there yet, but things are moving fast. In late 2005, Osram was announcing "a breakthrough in polymer-OLED technology by achieving a record 25 lumens-per-watt (lm/W) of device efficiency". Now, they are announcing that they manufactured warm white OLEDs with an efficiency of 46 lm/W and a life of more than 5000 hours at a brightness of 1000 cd/m2. That's close to the efficiency of fluorescent lamps, and more than twice that of incandescent lamps....
After a 4-year, $13 million research project in collaboration with Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) and the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, GE has announced a new way to manufacture organic LEDs (OLEDs).
"Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process," said Anil Duggal, manager of GE’s Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. "Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices."...
Designed to help keep the lights on during and after the frequent earthquakes (and resulting power outages) in Japan, "Liteplug" is a combination motion-sensing nightlight/emergency flashlight. Leave it plugged in to the wall, and, as it gets dark when the sun goes down, a single light emitting diode (LED) emits a soft light; when someone walks past, the motion sensor picks it up and the light perks up, turning on all three bulbs so you don't walk in to a wall....
Gluh Lampe brick heater
The normally sensible Tyler Hamilton reports on a study which suggests that in cold places like Canada, an incandescent bulb can keep you warm and toasty in winter, and may be more environmentally benign than a compact fluorescent. In places like Quebec that get their electricity from hydropower, switching to CFLs would actually increase emissions by the equivalent of 40,000 cars as people use more natural gas to heat their homes.
And who wrote this study? A senior scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, Michael Ivanco, who might have a small vested interest in promoting such an idea. Furthermore if the study just looks at just the calories of heat rather than the location, it is not considering whether it is useful or wasted heat. I think one might find that a layer of heat from bulbs up near the ceiling does not do much good down at the floor, where the registers or radiators are. I doubt that in reality the heat from incandescent bulbs does much good at all. Stick to your nukes, Mike. ::The Star
...
Extraneous packaging and poor packaging design are a couple of TreeHugger's least favorite things, so we're always glad to see examples of better packaging and creative ways to reuse old packaging and keep it out of the landfill. Falling into the latter category is the green lighting from Amsterdam-based designer Anke Weiss; appropriately named "Packaging Lights," it takes typically disposable packaging -- cookies, juice, and soap, just to name a few -- and gives it new life as lighting.
We've seen this kind of thing done before -- creative recycling is always welcome on these pages -- but we like the balance this strikes between looking like the original packaging and taking on its own identity as lighting. What packaging would you want to see reincarnated as lighting? Hit the jump for more pics. ::Anke Weiss Studio via ::Yanko Design
See also: ::lite2go by knoend: A Product that Knows No End and ::Light Bulb Packaging: The Package Becomes the Product...
Lighting residential and commercial buildings accounts for about 1/4 of all electricity used in the U.S. according to the Department of Energy, and since most of that light is produced very inefficiently (incandescent and halogen light bulbs could be called "heat bulbs"), there is potential for huge savings.
Compact fluorescents (CFLs) are a step in the right direction, even though they have downsides such as mercury (even more mercury comes from coal plants), but light emitting diodes (LEDs) remain the most promising next step: more efficient, longer lasting.
Researchers at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, have made a discovery that brings LEDs closer to widespread adoption. They discovered that by coating blue LEDs with a layer of nanocrystals specially engineered to turn the blue light into warm white, they could produce light at efficiency of over 300 lumens of visible light per watt. "Typical white LEDs are less well matched to human eyes and provide only about 30 to 60 lumens of visible light per watt," so these would be 5 to 10x better! That's also better than CFLs which are closer to 80 lumens/watt....
What would it look like if a lamp met up with a coat rack and had a lovechild? How about a cup holder and a mail holder? German design student Karo Klipps has the answer with "Stummer Leuchter" (above, left) and "Knicklicht," two hybrid objects that allow your everyday floor lamp to do a little more. And you don't have to decide whether to turn on the lights or hang up your jacket.
The thing that strikes us about this is the simplicity with which extra function was added to the design; just a turn here and squiggle there, and the lamps do something totally different. It makes us think: What else in our home is just a slight modification away from having dual functions? It might not beat the lamp/sweeper combination, but we still think this guy would want one. Hit the jump to get up close & personal with the designs. ::Burg-Halle (in German) via ::designklub...
Demonstrating two big reasons why TreeHugger likes smart, green packaging design, this video from lighting designers Knoend pits their lite2go against a conventional lamp in a race to see which one is easier to unbox and assemble. Because the lite2go's packaging becomes the lampshade, not only does it assemble more easily, but it produces almost zero waste along the way (just a cardboard band and piece of hemp twine are left); it even comes with its own compact fluorescent lightbulb, minus extraneous packaging, of course. Pretty slick.
As we said before, one of the things we like best about this is that knoend is working on changing the paradigm for product and packaging design: "When people understand that the packaging IS the product, hopefully they start to understand the concept of 'zero waste.'" lite2go is available through their site, as well as a handful of US retailers scattered around the country and online. ::YouTube and ::Knoend...
Bringing his love of organic shapes, penchant for weaving and use of sustainable materials to a new collection, Kenneth Cobonpue's lighting and accessories carefully mix artful forms and spare designs to create a modern, fun feel. Kris Kros, pictured above, include a wall lamp (on the left), a pear-shaped pendant (right) and a room dividing screen (below the fold) that are created when bamboo twigs are tied to randomly-welded metal frame.
Cobonpue includes a handful of other pretty interesting designs in this collection, from rattan lamps whose colors are inspired by spiders and insects to a light inspired by jellyfish and sea anemones; hit the jump to see pics of some that caught our eye. ::HIVE via ::MoCo Loco
See also: ::Easy Armchair by Kenneth Cobonpue...
Chandeliers make a wonderful focal point for a room. Although we usually think of them as being more suitable for a hotel lobby or ballroom, there are some very funky ones being made, using recycled bits and pieces.
Madeleine Boulesteix makes hers out of vintage tea cups (pictured). She incorporates old kitchen utensils, jello moulds and cookie cutters into the structure. She says "I liberate them from their domestic duties by incorporating them in my chandeliers". She likes the idea of making something quite opulent out of humble objects.
Winnie Lui makes hers from found objects too: buttons, gloves, piping and figurines. Hers are less traditional looking; she likes to do them in either black or white. The composition is very complex and sophisticated and they would be at home in a chic bar or stylish apartment. ...
IKEA may be habitually averse to blowing its own horn - and many times with its combination of price and practicality it doesn't need to tout its own efficiency or sustainability efforts. The two new LED-based lighting series called Jansjö ('Yann-Hwe' is the approximate Swedish pronunciation) and Lack will, however, probably put the press on other lighting manufacturers to make LED lighting warmer and more affordable.
Perhaps the Jansjö won't win any design awards, as it looks a little bit like an outdoor shower. The Lack series pictured is also as spare as it gets. And IKEA isn't the only light design company to start using warmer light LEDs. But when the Swedish uber-furniture superstore starts selling a full-sized LED floor lamp that promises near to 6 years of bulb time for around US$69, other designers pay great attention. Swedish company Optoga and Seoul Semiconductor designed a double layer of phosphorus oxide in the diode to give better color rendition and warmth. Via ::MiljöRapporten (Swedish)
...
Vancouver-based Propellor Design has impressed in the past us with their groovy pendant lighting, and they turned a few heads at last week's Toronto Interior Design Show with the Century Chandelier. Made with panels of art glass or eco-resin, we like Century not only for its sustainable materials but for its nice balance of modern and more traditional design elements, and the panels produce a really interesting lighting effect; just don't forget the compact fluorescent lightbulbs to light it up.
Propellor has a nice collection of very thoughtful designs that give equal consideration to sustainability and function, including more lighting, furniture and commercial interiors. Check out their site to learn more about their design perspective and check out their products. ::Propellor Design via ::Green Design Girl...
When we talk about going off-grid, or otherwise unplugging from traditional power sources, it usually involves solar or wind power, or some other alternative that doesn't involved your local utility. Young designer Clay Moulton has figured out how to harness a different source to create electricity: gravity.
"Gravia" is his LED-lit floor lamp that combines human power and gravity to create a lighting source that will work for 200 years or so, and never need to be plugged in. The lamp has a weight that's raised every four hours or so; as it slowly descends, the downward motion is converted to torque via a high-efficiency ball screw. The torque is overdriven (at 1:160 for those of you scoring at home) by a harmonic drive gear hand, and the output from that spins a set of 12 high-strength neodymium magnets (which act as the rotor), spinning to power 10 high-output LEDs. Simple, no?...
I admit to having little tolerance for those who whine about the quality of light from compact fluorescent bulbs, but have learned that they can be used inappropriately. I am visiting mom in a condo north of Miami Beach, in the most un-TreeHugger place I have ever been (more on that later) but where the owners have diligently put CFLs everywhere. However when one puts five exposed CFLs over a dining room table it is more conducive to doing surgery than having dinner.
So I will concede that perhaps in some locations one cannot just swap out the old bulbs and put in the standard CFL; perhaps an investment in dimmable bulbs is appropriate, or a new fixture that diffuses the light a little more....
We wrote about the safe disposal of CFLs before. Here are the 10 steps to dealing with a broken light bulb, according to the UK government (see image).
In addition, if you break a low energy light bulb you should evacuate the room for at least fifteen minutes. It is not recommended to use a vacuum cleaner to get rid of broken pieces and you should not inhale any dust. The British authorities want to replace all incandescent light bulbs by 2011 in order to fight climate change but professor John Hawk, spokesman of the British Dermatology Foundation, warns that low energy light bulbs can cause severe problems for people with skin sensitive to light, who already can’t spend a lot of time in places illuminated with fluorescent lighting such as hospitals or factories. ...
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the weekly archive if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.
TreeHugger breaks it down for you in a series of in depth how-to articles that will help you green your life. No time like the present!
Put down that red pencil, editor Meg, that is not a typo. Dutch designer Pieke Bergmans puts LEDs into hand blown crystal light blubs, shown in Milan this month. She says:![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.treehugger.com/nav-commenters.gif)
Photo credit: 
A lot of neat things have come out of 
At 140 lumens/watt, these pill-sized plasma light bulbs by Luxim are a pretty awesome contender for "light of the future". They are almost 10 times more efficient than traditional incandescent light bulbs, twice as efficient as current high-end LEDs, and they also beat CFLs, most of which are around 50-80 lumens/watt. Only the prototype 
Combining precise control with some pretty suave looks and the efficiency of LEDs, Pablo Designs' Brazo task lamp proves we can have our cake and eat it, too. The desk lamp has 18 fully dimmable LEDs in a tube that rotates 360 degrees, meaning you can have just as much light as you want, just about wherever you want it. The super-efficient LEDs -- the exact energy consumption isn't listed, oddly -- are rated for 25,000 hours of life.
Designed by Pablo Pardo, the futuristic-looking lamp carries an equally futuristic price tag of $400 -- ouch! Being an early adopter has a price -- but we like all the different options the dimming and twisting provide. And to help reduce the sticker shock just a bit, remember that you'd probably buy and burn out 25 or 30 incandescent light bulbs in those 25,000 hours (we know, small consolation). Get 
It's an electroluminescent that glows when you step on it. "The glow that the rug emits is very soft," says co-inventor Leona Dean, of London South Bank University, who also noted the innovation's party applications, "It can provide ambient mood lighting or flash in time to music as a talking point at a party."
Livescience writes that Dean and another LSBU engineering student Zoe Robson developed the light-up rug, called Footlume, for a college course, and they will exhibit the innovation at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show in London this month.
Now if they could only hook it up with a piezoelectric generator dancefloor like the one at
After a 4-year, $13 million research project in collaboration with Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) and the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, GE has announced a new way to manufacture organic LEDs (OLEDs).
"Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process," said Anil Duggal, manager of GE’s Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. "Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices."...
Designed to help keep the lights on during and after the frequent earthquakes (and resulting power outages) in Japan, "Liteplug" is a combination motion-sensing nightlight/emergency flashlight. Leave it plugged in to the wall, and, as it gets dark when the sun goes down, a single light emitting diode (LED) emits a soft light; when someone walks past, the motion sensor picks it up and the light perks up, turning on all three bulbs so you don't walk in to a wall....
Extraneous packaging and 
Lighting residential and commercial buildings accounts for about 1/4 of all electricity used in the U.S. according to the Department of Energy, and since most of that light is produced very inefficiently (incandescent and halogen light bulbs could be called "heat bulbs"), there is potential for huge savings.
What would it look like if a lamp met up with a coat rack and had a lovechild? How about a cup holder and a mail holder? German design student Karo Klipps has the answer with "Stummer Leuchter" (above, left) and "Knicklicht," two hybrid objects that allow your everyday floor lamp to do a little more. And you don't have to decide whether to 
Bringing his love of organic shapes, penchant for weaving and use of sustainable materials to a new collection, Kenneth Cobonpue's lighting and accessories carefully mix artful forms and spare designs to create a modern, fun feel. Kris Kros, pictured above, include a wall lamp (on the left), a pear-shaped pendant (right) and a room dividing screen (below the fold) that are created when bamboo twigs are tied to randomly-welded metal frame.
Cobonpue includes a handful of other pretty interesting designs in this collection, from rattan lamps whose colors are inspired by spiders and insects to a light inspired by jellyfish and sea anemones; hit the jump to see pics of some that caught our eye. 
Chandeliers make a wonderful focal point for a room. Although we usually think of them as being more suitable for a hotel lobby or ballroom, there are some very funky ones being made, using recycled bits and pieces.
Madeleine 
IKEA may be habitually averse to blowing its own horn - and many times with its combination of price and practicality it doesn't need to tout its own efficiency or sustainability efforts. The two new LED-based lighting series called Jansjö ('Yann-Hwe' is the approximate Swedish pronunciation) and Lack will, however, probably put the press on other lighting manufacturers to make LED lighting warmer and more affordable.
Perhaps the Jansjö won't win any design awards, as it looks a little bit like an outdoor shower. The Lack series pictured is also as spare as it gets. And IKEA isn't the only light design company to start using warmer light LEDs. But when the Swedish uber-furniture superstore starts selling a full-sized LED floor lamp that promises near to 6 years of bulb time for around US$69, other designers pay great attention. Swedish company 
Vancouver-based 
When we talk about going off-grid, or otherwise unplugging from traditional power sources, it usually involves 
I admit to having 
We wrote about 
