18-Year-Old Invents Bad Ass Electric Bike to Combat Pollution

Cliched as it sounds, sometimes the youth really does have a fresh creative edge over the rest of the population. 18 year old Ben Gulak of Canada has spent the last few years creating a futuristic looking electric bike designed to reduce pollution. That’s right, he’s been working on this thing since he was a mere 14-15 years old.

The Telegraph has it:

Although it resembles a unicycle, the Uno has two wheels side by side and uses gyroscopic technology to stay upright.

Ben Gulak, 18, spent several years building the machine. The rider leans forward to accelerate to speeds of 25mph, and backwards to slow down.

Mr Gulak, from Canada, said: “I was inspired to make the bike after visiting China a few years ago and seeing all the smog. They all drive little bikes that are really polluting and I wanted to make something to combat that.”

Weighing 120lb, the bike is light enough to be taken indoors to be charged up, and runs for 2.5 hours.

Don’t you want one? When I saw the photo, the ‘Jetsons’ theme song instantly started playing in my head. When I was a little girl, I was under the impression that by the time I was in my 20’s we’d be living in a Jetsons-style futuristic world, and of course we’re nowhere near that, but cool inventions like this make it seem closer. I just hope that more of the inventions to come are as eco-friendly as this one.

Link [The Telegraph]

Photo credit: Motorcycle Mojo

More Info for College Students: Princeton Review Adding Sustainability Ratings to their College Rankings

The jury’s still out on whether college ratings provided by outlets like Newsweek and the U.S. News and World Report are actually helpful to students and their families. There have been a lot of questions about some of the statistics used to rank schools, and some colleges have been known to intentionally skew data to rank higher.

One way that these college rankings can be helpful to college students, however, is getting a feel for a school’s eco-friendliness via The Princeton Review’s new sustainability ratings. Beginning this year, you’ll be able to see a school’s ‘green rating’ in The Princeton Review’s annual college rankings.

From the Maneater:

The Princeton Review spokeswoman Harriet Brand said the “green rating” measures how well schools are using their environmental practices to deliver a better campus experience and to prepare students to succeed in their future careers.

The rating criteria includes how environmentally responsible a school’s policies are, whether students have a quality of life on campus that is both healthy and sustainable and how well a school is preparing its students for employment and for citizenship in a world defined by environmental challenges.

The data for the rating is based entirely on the 2007-2008 academic year.

Adding a rating like this to widely read rankings from the Princeton Review, which many prospective students and parents take very seriously, could be a great thing for the future of green practices in colleges. It could introduce a little competition into the sustainability practices at the schools highlighted in the issue. Students win, the environment wins – sounds good to us.

Link [The Maneater]

Photo credit: Flickr user katmere

Heavy, Expensive, Wasteful College Textbooks are So 20th Century: Why Aren’t Ebooks More Readily Available By Now?

As mountains of old, out of date college textbooks continue to pile up – and updated versions are published to take their places – the current system of buying and selling these books seems more and more antiquated. It begs the question, what other options do we have? Sure, you can buy and sell used books, but there are cons to that too.

Last March, Treehugger questioned the eco-friendliness of online book swaps. While purchasing or borrowing used books is way better than constantly paying for new ones, all that shipping back and forth makes it a little less green than it should be. At least one site, 2swap.com, gets a good rating from Treehugger but isn’t geared specifically toward college students.

Nearly all college students these days have laptops, and PDF versions of books are becoming more and more common. Imagine how much easier and less wasteful it would be if college books were licensed and sold electronically for a semester of use. You wouldn’t have to lug around an insane number of 20-pound books, you wouldn’t be out a ton of money even when selling your books back after you’re done with them and the old unwanted texts would stop their endless march to the landfill.

Perhaps starting up a signature drive to get more publishers to offer texts in ebook form would be a good way for college students to get their eco-activist on. Publishers are old school and most aren’t yet internet-savvy, but they’re like any other businesspeople: if there’s a demand, and they know they can make money off of it, they’ll take action. If enough students started requesting ebook versions of their college texts, there’s no reason why everybody couldn’t make the switch. It’d result in less trees being cut down, savings for college students, and a way for publishers to get their foot into the 21st century finally.

Here’s a partial list of college textbook publishers to get started. Any takers?

Link [Treehugger] + [2Swap] + [ACQWeb]

Photo credit: Flickr user anavrin

Moore College of Art & Design Turns Trash into Fashion

Would you wear a gown made of electrical tape and used shower curtains? How about a cocktail dress made of candy wrappers? Moore College of Art & Design held their eleventh annual Trash Fashion Show last Thursday, showing off over 20 eco-friendly designs made entirely of trash and reused items.

The event had students constructing garments made of items like soy packets, phone wire and old CDs. Students weren’t allowed to use anything new or store-bought; it all had to be trash and was held together by fishing line, glue guns and staplers. It was designed to get people to think about how items that are thrown away could be used differently.

While the contest was held in honor of Earth Day, and a similar one-time challenge was seen previously on an episode of the popular Bravo series ‘Project Runway’, things like this shouldn’t be seen as a stunt. There are plenty of things that are currently being thrown away that could function beautifully as materials for clothing, and if designers started taking it seriously, we could end up with some fabulous eco-fashion made of all kinds of recycled materials.

Link: [Moore College of Art & Design]

College Students: Pick Schools According to their Eco-Friendly Practices

College students, you’ve now got a great new tool at your disposal: a website that can help you choose a sustainable school. You may be wondering what exactly makes a school ‘sustainable’, and why you’d be interested in that information. The Daily Green has it:

Colleges can be as large as small cities, and therefore use a tremendous amount of resources, plus they have strong potential to mold the minds of the next generation of leaders.

In 2007 Grist released an editorial ranking of top green colleges, and this year the Kentucky-based Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education launched a pilot program to rate 90 U.S. and Canadian colleges on environmental impact.

It’s called Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), and is designed to be a voluntary, self-reporting framework for gauging progress toward sustainability. It is associated with the group’s Chill Out Competition to reduce global warming contributions, and the comment period ends May 30.

Until that ranking becomes available, prospies may want to check out this informative post on the blog of major student loan lender NextStudent. It’s a summary of 12 of the greenest colleges in America, including many that have been honored in the past by other groups

Among the top sustainable colleges are College of the Altantic, Middlebury College, Evergreen State College, Oberlin College, Harvard University and Warren Wilson College. Highlights of their eco-friendly practices include solar panels, energy efficiency programs, waste reduction, composting and organic farming. If you’re interested in a ‘green collar’ career or just want to be part of an institution that promotes earth friendly initiatives, this info could be really helpful.

Link [Daily Green] + [NextStudent]

Photo credit: Warren Wilson College