Photo via shooting brooklyn
According to a new study by
Pike Research, 76% of consumers are aware that one of the primary components for reducing e-waste is proper recycling. Rejoice! 76% of consumers can see the obvious!! Now the only trick to getting more of those consumers - indeed everyone - to act on recycling and being sticklers about ethical recycling methods by collectors and recyclers, is to figure out who foots the bill, because 37% of those consumers also think e-cycling should be a free service. And interestingly enough, not everyone thinks it's the manufacturers who should be responsible for the costs. ...
Photo via foxypar4
Last night the
Tech Awards kicked off in San Jose, California, honoring some
incredible innovation happening across several categories, including the environment, education, health, biosciences and more. The competition in the environment section was tough, with GRUPEDSAC, a project providing customizable eco-techniques toolkits for self-sufficiency, the Electronic Field Guide, which encourages citizen science and uses photos to identify leaves with mobile, hand-held and augmented reality visualization of information, and Cows to Kilowatts, which turns slaughterhouse waste into fuel. The latter scooped up the award for the environment, but there were other green-thinking winners as well. ...
photo: Chauncey Davis via flickr.
Remember how last week
Spain was touting a new wind power record, more than 50% of demand for part of the day on a Sunday morning? A pretty great thing, right? Not really, says the folks over at
Low-tech Magazine. Without actually reducing overall energy demand, just adding more renewable energy (and touting absurdist records like the top energy source for a three hour period in a day) won't get us anywhere. It's a good point:...
Photo: Tesla Motors
Roadster #203 Got Quite a Workout
Making a video game used to be all about a few guys writing code. But as the the industry grew into a mammoth, the production of games turned into huge enterprises employing tons of people and requiring more and more realistic sounds and images. One way to get realistic sounds is of course to go out in the field and record the real thing (we're pretty far from the BEEP BEEPs of old-school games). That's exactly what a few sound engineers from Microsoft Game Studios did when they found themselves needing some electric car sounds for the upcoming games
Forza and
Project Gotham Racing. Tom Burt, the owner of the electric Roadster #203 generously donated some sounds......
Image: CycleTracks iPhone App from Apple App Store
Crowdsourcing Bike Path Planning
People don't always go where you think they will. You can try to predict the best places for foot paths and bike routes, but you'll never be able to know for sure if they are located optimally... Unless there's a way to know where people are naturally going (the path of least resistance). That's exactly what the new free iPhone app by the San Francisco Transportation Authority is trying to do. ...
Screenshot via orkinful
Could the future of ultraportable laptops look more like this roll-up notebook? The concept design uses minimal materials, OLED technology for the screen, and hopes to be an all-in-one gadget that can sweep aside the need to have a laptop, e-reader, tablet and other devices.
...
Source: EPA
About Time
It's been almost 40 years since the EPA's SO2 standards were strengthened. Sounds like a tightening was overdue... Until now. The EPA is look at a proposal to establish a new national one-hour SO2 standard, between 50 and 100 parts per billion (ppb). "The existing primary standards were 140 ppb measured over 24-hours, and 30 ppb measured over an entire year. The Agency also is taking comment on alternative levels for the 1-hour standard up to 150 ppb."...
Image via GoodGuide
Stand in the middle of a store and find a product you want to get. Would you rather A) look up the product manually on your phone with the old GoodGuide app to find out how green the product is, or B)
scan the barcode and have the info pop right up? Most of us would prefer option B. GoodGuide recognized this and has announced the first iPhone application that scans barcodes to "provide impartial health, environment and social responsibility ratings of products and companies." And what's more - it's free. ...
The Race for Clean-Tech is On
A new study by the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation shows that the U.S. could be left behind by Asia (specifically by China, South Korea and Japan) when it comes to investing in clean-tech and clean energy. "These [three] Asian governments will invest $519 billion in clean technology between 2009 and 2013, compared to $172 billion by the U.S. government," the report titled says. ...
The CEO of
Zerofootprint, Ron Dembo, is a man who has
often written and
been written about on TreeHugger. Now it looks like this outspoken man is ready to let the world's power plugs start speaking for themselves. Zerofootprint, his energy and carbon management firm, has broken into the hardware world with TalkingPlugs, a system that includes devices that attach over existing electrical outlets, giving them special powers: namely the ability to wirelessly transmit their energy output and, inversely, to be remotely controlled and programmed. This opens to door to some very cool features....
LivinGreen Materials showed off their drop-in solution to creating more efficient, cheaper solar cells. And their claim is no small number. They say their solution - which would remove one layer from the solar cells currently manufactured and replace it with a layer created by their new technology - could improve efficiency by 50% all while making it cheaper to manufacture solar cells.
...
Photo via Collin Allen
After discovering nearly a million users had modified their consoles to play pirated games via the Xbox live service, Microsoft gave them the boot from the service and now the modified consoles are making their way onto the market by the hundreds, with more likely to follow. The ban works on the console, not the user's account, which means Xbox consoles useless for the Xbox Live service are being sold everywhere from eBay to Craigslist, creating a bit of an
e-waste nightmare and some unhappy buyers.
...
Less precipitation falling, and when it comes it falls in a shorter period of time... photo: Harry via flickr.
Compared to the focus on Arctic and Antarctic ice melting,
glacial retreat and
climate change in the Himalaya doesn't quite get the same coverage. Which, as a new survey by Indian NGO
Navdanya shows, is a shame as the effects of global warming on the region are already directly impacting the lives of people who did nothing to create the problem:...
It was only last month we saw a
super sexy solar iPhone charger from Regen roll out. Now that same company has put out a beautiful solar powered speaker, the
Reverb, that can play between 20 and 40 hours on a full charge. And this is no wimpy counter-top speaker, either. ...
Photos: Public domain
Good Intentions, But Let's Wait for Real-World Results
The Chinese government and many Chinese businesses have been making pretty big bets on electric cars in the past few years. In fact, the
richest man in China, Wang Chuanfu (in Chinese: 王传福), owes much of his fortune (at least on paper) to investments in electric cars and their batteries. So it isn't surprising that electric cars were on the agenda during the meeting between Barack Obama and Hu Jintao; what came out of it is the US-China "Electric Vehicles Initiative"....
Platforms that show us our energy usage are getting to be a dime a dozen. Not that it's a bad thing, of course. Knowing our data is a big part of reducing consumption.
Dot UI is a start-up wanting to make energy consumption as personalized as possible so that people avoid information overload, and get the data where they're most likely to see it, whether that's their television, a digital photo frame, a mobile phone. Not too unique, since many user dashboards can be displayed on various devices - but they're all typically
visual devices. What really stands out with Dot UI is another area they're putting emphasis - ensuring that the visually impaired and disabled can get a hold of their data as quickly and easily as anyone else using the software. ...
Photo via brownpau
Well, the battle over California adopting new TV efficiency standards has been fun to watch, what with the Consumer Electronics Industry stomping around and turning red in the face at the idea of not being able to have a handful of the most energy-sucking TVs on store shelves in the state. However, a decision has been made in favor of efficiency. Just announced is word that, by a unanimous 5-0 vote, the California Energy Commission adopted the most advanced TV energy efficiency standards in the world. Read on to see what the new standards will mean. ...
Proposed GreenGen IGCC coal plant in Tianjin, China
The
US-China duck pancake of climate cooperation, made this week by Presidents Obama and Hu, has left us with much to chew over. But the component that everyone was waiting for -- and that few could be surprised about -- was the announcement on coal. No effort at cleaning the air or reducing CO2 will matter without really addressing the black stuff. So the two countries announced a "21st century coal" initiative, "a program of technical cooperation to bring teams of U.S. and Chinese scientists and engineers together in developing clean coal and carbon capture and storage technologies."
But what does this vision of "21st century coal" really mean, given the
big conundrum of carbon capture -- and what's the Chinese translation?...
Image: Dell
Competition to be and look green in the personal computing industry is reaching a
fever pitch. Debates rage over which companies are raising the bar and which are baiting and switching. Packaging, to be sure, is a big piece of the puzzle. This week, Dell announced that it will ship two of its hot netbooks in packaging made from processed bamboo, raising some tough questions....
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the
if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.
on 11.21.09
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