Brunton Vapor-AF: Precision Stove Burns Any Flammable Liquid

What a cool bit of green gear for any traveler! Wired reviewed the new Brunton Vapor-AF, a precision stove that’s able to burn any flammable liquid from butane to kerosene. It’s easy to use, looks nice, and pumps out 12,000 BTUs. Perfect for camping, hiking, power outages or anytime you need an efficient little portable cook stove.

From Wired:

WIRED Comes with 20.3-ounce aluminum fuel canister and thick foil windscreen. Stuff sack pocket is a perfect stash for included multitool and jet-cleaning needle. Beerlover’s bonus: Multitool has an integrated opener. Precision flame control for both butane and liquid fuel — we can’t stress enough how fantastic this is.

TIRED No built-in ignition. Legs don’t lock in place. A tad noisy. Plastic fuel pump won’t outlive the brass/aluminum/steel stove. Modest 6-inch diameter from end to end, so no super-wide pots. Two bills for a single burner?

The Brunton costs $180 and is available over at Amazon.

Link [Wired]

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Virginia High School Catches 280,000 Gallons of Rainwater Annually

While many of us have yet to even install rainwater barrels outside our homes, some people are saving a dramatic amount of water with giant barrels placed outside public buildings like schools and office buildings.  The Langston Brown Community Center and High School in Arlington, Virginia has two 24-ft tall 11,000-gallon cisterns to catch and store rainwater, which capture up to 280,000 gallons per year.  One tank is located at the back of the school and the other is in front, covered with panels to make it blend in seamlessly with the building.

Schools are such a great place to deploy this kind of green technology.  It teaches the kids early on never to let resources go to waste, and makes it such a normal everyday thing that they will hopefully grow up to use these resource-saving measures in their daily lives without question.  Way to go, Langston Brown!

Link [Metaefficient]

Save Money & Waste with a Home Soda Maker

Soda: it’s one of the hardest junk foods to give up.  I started cleaning up my diet years ago in an attempt to cut way back on processed foods, choosing whole foods instead whenever possible, but Diet Coke is the one thing I keep going back to.  I can’t explain why this gross, chemical-laden brown bubbly substance is so attractive, but it is.  I’m not alone – the average American consumes 43,371 cans of soda over 77 years.  Mindboggling, especially when you consider all the waste from those cans and bottles that end up in landfills.

There’s hope for us yet. This strange penguin-shaped countertop gadget actually lets you make your own soda, and control exactly what goes into it.  The Penguin has a carbonator, a carafe and a few manual pumps that turn plain water into seltzer or soda.  You can control the level of carbonation, and exactly what goes into it – plus, it doesn’t use electricity.
It might seem at first like just another piece of junk for your house, and the price is a bit steep, but it would be great to have one less thing you had to buy every week at the grocery store, plus you could reuse a couple of containers over and over.

The Nibble has a breakdown of how the Penguin works.  It’s really pretty simple!

Link [The Nibble] via [EcoSalon]

Next Generation Toyota Prius Will Have Solar Panels

Toyota will be installing solar panels on the roof of the next generation Prius, set to begin production next year and released in 2010.  The power generated by the solar panels will be used to power the air conditioning system, which was previously putting strain on the hybrid powertrain.   The panels will only be available on high-end Prius models.

There have also been rumors that the next generation Prius will have a lithium battery and may get over 100mpg.  The body has been redesigned to be slightly larger and more aerodynamic.

I can’t wait to see how high gas prices are going to continue to spur innovation in all industries.  We should be seeing some extremely cool cars in the next few years, and the best part is they’ll be getting greener and greener!  With so many interesting new designs and concepts in the works right now, the hardest part will be choosing between them all.

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: Popular Mechanics

VW’s Sleek ‘One-Liter Car’ Gets 235 Miles Per Gallon

This sexy looking vehicle might look like the future, but it’s going to be here sooner than you think. The best part is, it gets a stunning 235 miles per gallon. Yes, you read that right.

Volkswagen calls this baby the ‘One-Liter Car’, so named because that’s how much fuel it takes to get it 100 kilometers. It’s been on the back burner for six years now – the company’s been waiting for the material the body is made out of, carbon fiber, wasn’t expected to become affordable until 2012. Carbon fiber is a lightweight material that results in the entire car weighing only 660 pounds.

Well, lucky for car porn enthusiasts, VW has decided to start building a limited number of One-Liters in 2010 in their prototype shop, which will allow them to build about 1,000 a year to start.

From Wired’s Autopia:

VW unveiled the slick two-seater concept six years ago at a stockholder’s meeting in Hamburg. To prove it was a real car, Chairman Ferdinand Piech personally drove it from Wolfsburg to Hamburg. At the time, he said the car could see production when the cost of its carbon monocoque dropped from 35,000 Euros (about $55,000) to 5,000 Euros (about $8,000) — something he figured would happen in 2012. With carbon fiber being used in everything from airliners to laptops these days, VW’s apparently decided the cost is competitive enough to build at least a few hundred One-Liters.

VW’s engineers — who spent three years developing the car — made extensive use of magnesium, titanium and aluminum to bring it in at less than one-third the weight of a Toyota Echo. According to Canadian Driver, the front suspension assembly weighs just 18 pounds. The six-speed transmission features a magnesium case, titanium bolts and hollow gears; it weighs a tad more than 50 pounds. The 16-inch wheels are carbon fiber.

The magnesium steering wheel weighs a little more than a pound. How much of the concept car’s exotic hardware makes it to the production model remains to be seen.

Drool. The future of green cars is looking very nice. VW has really thought of every last detail with the One-Liter, which is incredibly aerodynamic and energy-efficient. Get all of the details at Wired’s Autopia blog.

Link [Wired]
Photo credit: Volkswagen

New ‘Green’ Milk Jugs Not Cutting it with Consumers

So, apparently green milk jugs kind of suck. At least, that’s according to the Wal-Mart and Costco shoppers who have purchased the newly redesigned gallon jugs and complain about how hard they are to pour. These new jugs have been introduced because they’re cheaper to ship, better for the environment, cost less and provide fresher milk to the store. The new shape makes the jugs stackable and eliminates the need for crates. Indentations in the plastic give the jugs structural support.

From The New York Times, via Treehugger:

The jugs have no real spout, and their unorthodox shape makes consumers feel like novices at the simple task of pouring a glass of milk.

“I hate it,” said Lisa DeHoff, a cafe owner shopping in a Sam’s Club here.

“It spills everywhere,” said Amy Wise, a homemaker.

“It’s very hard for kids to pour,” said Lee Morris, who was shopping for her grandchildren.

Eco-Fail – not because it’s not innovative or is a bad idea, but because this is the sort of thing that turns off the millions of Wal-Mart shoppers from ‘green’ products and ideas. I mean, great way to turn the Wal-Mart set green – take away their easy pouring milk jugs and give them something to complain about, especially in this nation of resistance to change. They’re more than likely not going to care if the jugs help the environment if they can’t even pour milk into a bowl of cereal without spilling it.

A commenter on the Treehugger post suggested some kind of reusable accessory – stainless steel, perhaps – that mounts onto the jug to make it easier to pour. Great idea, but would Wal-Mart shoppers really go for that? They want simple, cheap and fast. Perhaps another redesign is in the cards – one that’s more practical for everyday use.

Link [The New York Times] via [Treehugger] via [Bag of Nothing]
Photo credit: David Maxwell for the New York Times

Biodegradable Motor Oil Made from Cow Fat Now Available

Motor oil is nasty stuff. It’s the biggest source of pollution in most waterways and can contain toxic substances like benzene and lead. As new vehicles begin to move toward a more eco-friendly model all around, motor oil will likely get a makeover too – or perhaps be reinvented all together using cow fat. That’s right, you could use cow fat instead of motor oil for a biodegradable, natural, non-polluting lubricant. Right now, it’s only available for recreational vehicles - not yet for full-size automobiles.

From Eco Geek via Green Daily:

Green Earth Technologies, creator of organic engine products, has released their new automotive lubricant to its G-Oil line, a 10W-30 that has set a new biodegradability standard. The oil biodegraded over 90% in a speedy 9 days, blowing the 28-day rate of decomposition required by the American Society of Testing Materials out of the water. Pretty impressive.

The oil, like the others in the line, is made from saturated fat from cows, which works great for high performance in engines. This new oil is for 4-cycle off-road and recreational vehicle engines and so helps out an eensy bit with the impact vehicles have when operated, though it’s not like these types of vehicles tend to be ultra green in the first place.

Green Daily worries that this will give companies a new reason to coop cows up and harvest a different kind of fluid from them. If my understanding of the process is correct, slaughterhouses would simply have a different use for the fat left over as byproducts. I can’t imagine that they would lock cows up and ‘harvest’ fat from them to make oil, but then again, some of the things they do to animals in the livestock industry is pretty unimaginably disgusting and cruel, so who knows. Doing it that way would certainly be a step in the wrong direction.

One thing I do know is, a lot of people out there right now are wondering whether cow fat motor oil would make your exhaust smell like hamburgers. Dirty, burnt hamburgers from the greasiest diner on the side of the highway – just the way some folks like it, I guess. Yuck.

Link [Green Daily] + [Eco Geek]
Photo credit: Flickr user Michael (mx5tx)

Green Car Rental Round Up: Who’s Going Green and Who’s Missing the Boat

Want to rent a car, but wishing you had more green choices?  As it stands, you’re in luck. Car rental companies are cautiously entering the world of green vehicles as consumers look for higher fuel efficiency ratings that will save them money on gas. Demand for hybrids across the country has skyrocketed lately as fuel prices have risen ever higher.

Some experts are telling the companies to slow down their green fleet efforts, since they’re convinced that the extra money consumers pay to rent a hybrid outstrips high fuel costs. Rates for hybrids at all of the major rental car companies average $5-$15 more per day than similar sized non-hybrid vehicles. That’s not stopping most of the major rental car companies from beefing up their fleets of green vehicles, though; nearly all of them plan to slowly increase the number of hybrids and fuel-efficient compact vehicles available to rent as demand grows.

So, who’s going green and who’s missing the boat?

Since 2006, Hertz Rent a Car has been offering consumers a ‘Green Collection’, which includes the Toyota Prius hybrid and three non-hybrid but small and fuel-efficient vehicles: the Toyota Camry, the Ford Fusion and the Toyota Corolla. The Green Collection fleet is comprised of 35,000 vehicles. All of them are reservable by specific make and model, have a fuel efficiency rating of 28 mpg or more and are available at 50 major airport locations across the U.S. For every reserved and paid Green Collection rental, Hertz contributes $1 to the National Park Foundation. They’ve pledged a minimum contribution of $1 million.

Hertz is pushing hybrids in Manhattan especially, where they’ve got 100 of them. Company officials say the stop-and-go traffic of the city provides the ideal driving environment for hybrids, since they’d primarily operate off of the electric motors.

Hertz also announced earlier this year that by the end of the summer, they’ll have spend $68 million adding another 3,500 hybrids to their fleet. They also won points with customers recently when they announced that they’re doing away with ridiculously high refueling fees starting July 1st 2008. The fees are currently as high as $8 per gallon when you don’t bring back your rental car with a full tank. Under the new rules, customers will pay fair market value for gas along with a $6.99 fee for the refueling service.

Last year, Avis Budget Group expanded its fleet to include the Toyota Prius and the Nissan Altima hybrid along with the Ford Escape hybrid. Avis’ hybrid fleet numbers 2,500 out of their total 375,000 vehicles. Avis’ foray into the green rental car world has been slow and cautious as the company tests certain markets to make sure that the demand for these vehicles is really there.

Thrifty Car Rental and Dollar Rent a Car, both owned by the Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, have made the least progress toward a greener fleet of any major car rental company. Their spokespeople have said that they have ‘a few’ hybrids and biofuel vehicles, but have had trouble purchasing more due to high retail demand. They also blame what they call their core customer group: people wanting to rent large vehicles at lower prices for family vacations and other short-term uses.

In terms of environmental initiatives, Enterprise Rent-a-Car (and its sister brands, Alamo and National) is probably the winner of the green rental car race. The company offers the largest fleet of hybrids and fuel efficient vehicles of any rental car agency in America: their fleet numbers 440,000, and that includes 5,000 hybrids and 73,000 ‘flex fuel’ cars that can run on E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gas.

In April of this year, Enterprise also opened four ‘green’ branches in Atlanta, where they have a fleet of 4,000 hybrids and other fuel-efficient vehicles available. In Portland, the company has five biodiesel vehicles available to rent.

They have also pledged to plant 50 million trees in national forests all over the country to offset their rental fleet’s carbon emissions. Enterprise is responsible for planting 1/7th of all trees planted in national forests in 2007. They also offer customers the opportunity to offset carbon emissions by paying $1.25 per rental, which the company will match dollar-for-dollar up to $1 million annually.

That’s not a big surprise for anyone who knows anything about the Taylor family, who own Enterprise: they’ve got a long history of environmental advocacy. They donated $30 million to the Missouri Botanical Garden in 2002, and gave $25 million to create the Enterprise Rent-a-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels, which researches biofuels.

Unfortunately, Enterprise’s efforts are undermined by a few factors. First, there’s the fact that E85 fueling stations aren’t widely available – not to mention the fact that ethanol isn’t really a sustainable alternative fuel. Another issue that all rental car companies are facing is that there aren’t enough hybrids being produced at the moment for the companies to buy, which means customers aren’t guaranteed a hybrid when they want to reserve one. Part of the blame lies on customers, too: only 1 in 10 are paying the extra $1.25 per rental to offset their carbon emissions.

Residents in some metro areas of the U.S. have more eco-options than just the major car rental companies. EV Rental Cars offers environmentally friendly vehicles in six California cities – LA, San Diego, Santa Ana, San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland – along with Phoenix, Arizona. EV is currently the only full-on eco-friendly rental car company – they don’t offer conventional vehicles. Fox Rent a Car, a discount rental car service, works with EV Rental Cars to provide green rentals to customers at all of their U.S. locations.  And, if you’ll be taking a vacation to Maui anytime soon, you have the option of selecting a biodiesel vehicle at Bio-Beetles, the nation’s only all-biodiesel rental car service.

As gas prices continue to rise, it seems safe to assume that consumer demand for hybrids will increase as well, and hopefully rental car agencies will continue to meet these needs with increasing numbers of hybrids and other cleaner, greener vehicles.

Photo credit: Flickr user Beige Alert

Simple, Natural Earth Surf Jewelry

Eco-friendly jewelry isn’t just about conflict-free diamonds. Using sustainable, natural materials in everything we put in and on our bodies is a goal for a lot of us (still working on finding sunglasses not made in China, though!).

When it comes to earth-friendly jewelry, Earth Surf really has it down to a science: there is so much beauty in the simplicity of sea glass taken straight from beaches all over the U.S. and in Barbados. Jennifer Stone Gonzales, founder and jewelry artist, takes the sea glass she finds on the beach and drills a hole in it for stringing – she doesn’t machine-tumble it, polish it, or alter it in any way. Sea glass is, of course, fragments of glass that have been smoothed naturally by the ocean surf.  The pieces of sea glass used in Earth Surf jewelry may have once been a beer bottle, an ink bottle, a drinking glass, a vase or part of a fisherman’s glass boat.

What results is a wide variety of recycled treasures in colors ranging from amber and cobalt to leaf green and pale sea foam. Jennifer hand-strings these beautiful pieces of sea glass on leather and silk cord, and secures them with sailor’s knots rather than metal clasps. Each piece is completely unique.

Check out the Earth Surf website for more info about how Jennifer finds her sea glass, or browse the selections available at the Earth Surf Etsy Shop.

Link [Earth Surf] + [Etsy]

‘The Green Bible’ Aims to Preach the Green Gospel, Literally

One thing that has always confused me about Christians is that so many of them are global warming deniers or at the very least, think environmentalists are kooks. I guess there is conflicting information in the bible, which seems to indicate that God has left the world in human hands to care for his creations, yet there’s also the attitude seen on those bumper stickers, ‘In the event of the Rapture, this car will be unmanned’. In other words, a lot of Christians seem to have the attitude that the ‘upcoming’ second coming of Christ gives us license to mess up the environment as much as we want with no real consequences.

Publisher HarperOne aims to give Christians a guide that will help them interpret the environmental themes in the bible via ‘The Green Bible’. From Business Week:

This fall, it will publish The Green Bible, complete with cotton/linen cover, partly recycled paper, soy-based ink, and passages about caring for the earth highlighted in green. The $29.95 edition of the Good Book also includes essays and a study guide about the spiritual mandate to protect the environment. (Tauber says study guides helped sell the Archeological Study Bible, published in 2006 by Harper’s Zondervan unit.) Hoping to sell 25,000 to 30,000 copies a year, he plans to market The Green Bible to eco-aware churches and influential thinkers. Essay contributor Calvin B. DeWitt, a University of Wisconsin environmental professor and an evangelical Christian, says the Bible is “a kind of ecological handbook for right living on Earth.” A passage he cites: Genesis 2:15, in which God bids Adam to serve and keep the Garden of Eden.

I guess if you’re going to believe in an invisible sky wizard (it’s no crazier than a flying spaghetti monster), you should at least be reading about it in a green book. RAmen.

Link [Business Week]

Book Review – The Urban Homestead: Your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city

Ever since I happened upon the Path to Freedom website a few years ago, I’ve been very interested in urban homesteading.  I’m eager to drink in as much information as possible for use now, as a renter, and in the future, once I own my own home.  So, I was excited to read The Urban Homestead: Your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen of the ‘Homegrown Evolution’ blog.

Urban homesteading is all about reducing your dependence on our consumerist, mindless-television-watching culture.  When you think about it, many of us are incredibly reliant on grocery stores, the power grid, city water and gas-powered transportation.  Our food is typically grown thousands of miles away, so we have no real connection to it.  And, what would happen if the power went out, grocery stores closed down, ‘peak oil’ actually  happened, or any other scenario that left us without all of the conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to?  We’ve lost the power that our ancestors held, which has been transferred to faceless corporations.

As an urban homesteader, you take that power into your own hands by growing your own food, saving (and sometimes producing your own) energy, water catchment systems and plain ol’ riding a bike.  You can take it further by raising chickens and other animals, foraging for edibles and even making your own alcoholic beverages.  All of these things are possible in city environments, and The Urban Homestead explains how to do it.

What I love most about this book is the authors’ refreshing attitude about the amount of work it takes to be an urban homesteader (and the occasional joking references to using these skills in the event of a zombie attack).  From the outside looking in, urban homesteading is an awful lot of hard work, but Kelly and Erik make it seem far less overwhelming with a ‘work makes work’ and ‘just do what you can’ take.  It gives you the confidence to start your own journey toward self-sufficiency, even if you start in very small ways.

The Urban Homestead isn’t meant to be a one-volume instruction manual for every single skill you need to be more self-sufficient.  Rather, it gives an excellent overview of the skills you should learn – along with many helpful tips – and lists of resources where you can find more in-depth information on each topic.  Think of it as a primer that points you in all the right directions for each skill set.  It’s an engaging read, and it will get you excited about the possibilities of living a better, more self-reliant life no matter where you live.

Link [Homegrown Evolution] + [Amazon.com]

Motion-Powered Cell Phone Chargers

You may have heard of the dance clubs that harness the energy created by all of those writhing bodies and use it to generate part of the building’s power. Now, we’re hearing about some cool new devices that will actually charge cell phones and other handheld electronics through movement – and you don’t even have to exert too much energy. M2E, a Boise Idaho based company, says their charger will capture energy from your regular everyday motions.

From earth2tech:

It works according to the principles of Faraday’s law of induction, which states that moving a conductor through a magnetic field will induce a current in that conductor proportional to the speed of movement. M2E Power has managed to tweak the output of the Faraday setup to generate a lot more power than previous kinetic energy systems — an increase of between 300 percent and 700 percent vs. what’s currently available, according to the company.

M2E Power tells us it’s talking with the accessories divisions of the major cell phone makers, as well as some of the major accessories manufacturers. Back in November the company raised $8 million from OVP Venture Partners, @Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures, to hire 12-15 people, mostly engineers and lab technicians, in an effort to get their first product into the military field sometime this year.

M2E Power aims to have the charger provide an hour of talk time for six hours of normal movement (about two days worth, assuming that you’re a light talker and only use your cell phone 30 minutes per day). As someone who dislikes talking on the phone and uses a cell phone fairly rarely, I would love to have this charger – I would never have to plug my phone into the wall again!

The charger may be available as early as 2009. The image above shows the current prototype (battery pictured for size comparison).

Link [earth2tech]

Organic Cotton Jeans Dyed with Traditional Woad

You may have heard of woad before due to its historically inaccurate use as blue face paint in the Mel Gibson epic, Braveheart. Woad, which comes from a flowering plant, was overused and completely wiped out in the 16th century, so traders turned to the Far East for indigo, another blue dye, which is still used by most denim companies today.

A company called Dondup is bringing woad back from the dead with their new line of organic cotton jeans. Dondup, located in Italy, has begun growing the plant for use as dye. Woad – called Guado in Italian - once grew all over the Italian countryside, and Dondup is helping to reintroduce the plant. Dondup also uses other natural dyes for colors other than blue, including rose madder and blackberry.

Check out Dondup’s line of denim on their website.

Link [Dondup] via [Springwise]

Alternative to a Digital Camera: A Box with a Hole in it

We may not have liked Low Tech Magazine’s bumper car idea, but this one is actually really good. Sometimes, in this world full of ever-increasing, complicated technology, the simplest solutions are the best ones, as Low Tech shows with their pinhole camera demonstration. Pinhole cameras are the ultra-green consumer’s alternative to purchasing expensive digital cameras that will just be obsolete e-waste in a few years – just get a box and put a small hole in it.

From Low Tech Magazine:

A pinhole camera is very easy to make yourself, although it can also be bought. Basically, it is a light-tight box with a tiny pinhole on one side (made with a needle) and photo paper or film on the other side (taped to the box). No lens, battery or automatic operation is used. A pinhole camera can be constructed from a can or a container, as in this mint tin [see photo] (see the pictures made with it) or this tea can. The vessel used could also be a coffee pot, for instance. A pinhole camera can be built from scratch using cardboard or wood, or made from an existing camera by removing the lens and replacing it with a pinhole. These low-tech cameras could be as small as a matchbox, but they might as well have the dimensions of a suitcase or a refrigerator as they allow you to produce gigantic photographs.

The photos pinhole cameras produce are really stunning. They have that romantic, hazy, sort of eerie quality to them that’s hard to capture with a super-sharp digital camera. Plus, as Low Tech points out, “Digital photography might spare the harmful chemicals of the analog developing process, but the materials and energy needed to produce a continuous stream of new gadgets (and batteries) is far worse.”

Link [Low Tech Magazine]
Photo credit: Chris Keeney

Long Lasting Tees Don’t Make Golf Eco-Friendly

I don’t know much about golf, but apparently wood tees don’t last very long – they splinter and leave litter all over the grass. A company called Eco Golf has created the Endurance Tee, which outlasts wood tees 10 to 1.

The company explains it:

Since the Endurance tee is so long lasting tee box litter is virtually eliminated.

The final benefit of the endurance tee is that it is manufactured with degradable materials. The tee will breakdown over time and when placed in active compost the process is greatly accelerated.

We’re glad to see golfers greening up their tees, but considering they’re using it in the middle of a giant carpet of pesticide filled grass cut by giant gas mowers sitting where natural lands used to be, it feels a bit small. It’s akin to a NASCAR team switching their cell phone service over to Working Assets- a nice gesture but a drop in the bucket in the big picture.

Golf could definitely get a lot greener. Many golfers and golf course owners are taking steps to help. While we’d prefer an untouched plot of land to a golf course any day, golf courses can provide certain environmental benefits in urban and suburban areas as a substitute for more concrete and asphalt – or to clean up disused sites like quarries and mines. We know that golf courses aren’t going to disappear, so we’d like to see more care being taken in making sure they aren’t all chemical-filled resource hoggers. You can get more info about greener golf at Golf and the Environment and Beyond Pesticides.

Link[EcoGolf] via [iGreenSpot]

Cradle to Cradle Design: 100% Biodegradable Furniture

In the last few decades, furniture has gotten incredibly wasteful. Think about how many crappy items you’ve purchased – tables, chairs, desks, bookshelves – that were made with such cheap materials in such a shoddy way that they fell apart after only a few years. Such throwaway furniture has increased the amount of crap that piles up in landfills day after day. You might think that going back to sturdier, more well-made furniture is the answer, but what if we could have 100% biodegradable furniture that could just be composted in your garden after you’re done with it?

Triplepundit has it:

A recently created design house by eight Dutch design students has embraced C2C fully. The company, called Artishok, has just completed its first designs after spending months researching the best 100% biodegradable materials for modern furniture.

The team was directly inspired by William McDonough, an architect, and the chemist Michael Braungart, the two inventors of C2C. The duo believes that another Industrial Revolution is at hand which is concentrated around ecological production methods.

The Artishok design studio embodies this perfectly, creating furniture from corn based plastics. Artishok’s products look no different than other designer stuff and the advantage of the Artishok items is that they virtually do not contribute to your carbon footprint. After use, you can safely throw the furniture on your garden’s compost heap without polluting the soil even 1%. That means that the eight students are about as close as any designers to replicating the natural cycle directly.

Because they’re made of 100% natural materials, they eliminate the garbage problem completely. Can you imagine, millions of people across the world never throwing another piece of furniture in the trash? That’s the direction we need to go in, for sure.  I can’t wait to see more furniture designers embracing the cradle to cradle concept!

Link [Triplepundit]
Photo credit: Flickr user jetheriot

Playstation 3 is a Huge Energy Hog

Wow. If you’re trying to ‘go green’ and you have a Playstation 3, you may want to consider switching to a Wii. An Australian consumer group found that the Sony Playstation 3 consumes five times more energy than a medium sized refrigerator – 10 times as much as the Wii.

From Intology:

They found out that a medium sized refrigerator of about 12 cu. ft. volume (60 inches in height) will cost $50 a year while Sony Playstation 3 will cost $250 a year even if it is not in use and only turned on. Microsoft XBox came second behind Playstation 3.

$250! Imagine what you could do with that money instead of draining energy unnecessarily. You could put it toward buying yourself a Wii! (No, Nintendo is not paying me to tell you that.)

Link [Intology]

Photo credit: Flickr user MNgillen

Apple Working on Solar Powered Portable Devices

There’s no way around it: portable electronic devices are here to stay. We’ve all got them: cell phones, electronic organizers, laptop computers, mp3 players and other handhelds. While it’s great that many of them are getting lighter and smaller, what we’d really love is to be able to charge them with the power of the sun. Well, we’re getting closer.

TrendHunter Magazine has it:

Imagine your iPhone or iPod automatically charging by the sun as you use it. A new Apple patent promises exactly that, by exploring the use of solar power in various versions of their mobile devices: iPhone, iPods and portable computers. The mechanism augments the devices, including the transparent screens, with layers of solar cells,.

According to the patent, “Solar cells are typically stacked with other layers made of transparent or semi-transparent materials… Some of these layers may be used for display or input purposes, and some layers may be coated with various materials or they may be etched with product logos or other patterns.”

We have all of our fingers and toes crossed on this one. How great would it be to sit on the beach or in your garden, with your phone and iPod charging next to you, no cords required? Steve Jobs, you’re our only hope, give us solar powered handhelds!

Link [TrendHunter Magazine]
Photo credit: Flickr user ernop

Sweet! The Dutch Build the World’s First Solar Speedboat

Oh, how I love basking in the sunshine, smelling the salty air and dipping a foot into the water while relaxing on a boat. Too bad motor boats are really not good for the environment – they’re noisy, they use a lot of energy and leak oil. Then I saw this: the world’s first solar powered speedboat. Drrooooollll.

From gizmag:

Electricity and water: we usually do everything we can to keep the two apart, but it seems the electric engine revolution is moving through the boating world as well. And when you’re out on the water enjoying a speedboat, what more appropriate power source is there than the sun? The Czeers MK1 prototype solar speedboat is a 30-knot photovoltaic dream in delicious shades of carbon fiber Carbon fiber , solar cell and lush orange leather. Solar boats for environmental warriors eh? Next thing you’ll be telling us they’re making wind-powered ones.

The Czeers MK1 prototype is, as far as its Dutch creators are concerned, the world’s first solar speedboat. The Delft Technical University Solarboat Team built the original platform as an entry in the 2006 Nuon Frisian Solar challenge, which it easily won - and in the process, attracted serious investment power from Rabobank to get a full scale test boat built.

The resulting test boat, made from 100% carbon fiber inlaid with leather trim, photovoltaic cells on almost all horizontal surfaces and an LCD touch-screen control system, launched at the Millionaire Fair in 2007, and has since proven itself up to 30 knots on the water.

We are really looking forward to being rich ass green media tycoons. We’ll have a whole fleet of these babies. They won’t have leather trim though (yuck!). Seriously though, this thing is pretty sweet. No oil, no fumes, no engine noise. If you’re wondering about the cost, let’s put it this way: there’s a reason the LCD touch-screen system was launched at the Millionaire Fair.

You can check out a video of it in action on YouTube, complete with a weirdly inappropriate song choice (Aphex Twin).

Link [gizmag] + [YouTube]

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