Glide Through the Sky on a Pedal-Powered Monorail

If you’ve ever had dreams about riding your bike in the sky, a new human-powered monorail is about as close as you’ll ever come in real life – unless you want to brave the rickety-looking pedal-powered roller coaster in Japan. The ‘Shweeb’ has users enclosed in clear capsules, gliding along a monorail track on what are essentially recumbent bicycles, which can go up to 25mph.

From Inhabitat:

Although we don’t expect to see cities connected by pedal-powered monorail systems anytime soon, there are a number of applications where they could be useful. Think of guided tours through natural parks, scenic routes, adventure camps, and developments that require large pieces of land and a reasonable amount of population.

For now the system is in use on Schweeb’s grounds in New Zealand. If you are feeling adventurous, feel free to visit them at Ngongotha, New Zealand.

We can definitely imagine this kind of system in use in parks and other nature preserves, since they would minimize the impact that visiting humans would have on the ecosystem while still giving riders exercise and great views.

Link [Inhabitat]

Turning Rotten Bananas into Bricks of Fuel

In some African countries, like Rwanda, bananas are plentiful – and so are their discarded peels. But one thing that’s not plentiful is affordable fuel for cooking, lighting and heating. Researchers at Nottingham University have found a way to use the resources that are available by turning rotten banana peels into briquettes that would not only provide fuel but also help reduce deforestation by limiting reliance on firewood.

From BBC News:

According to scientists, for every one tonne of bananas, there are an estimated 10 tonnes of waste, made up of skins, leaves and stems.

It was on a visit to Rwanda that Joel Chaney, a PhD student from the University of Nottingham came up with the idea of developing a low-tech approach to turn this banana waste into an efficient fuel source.

Back in the laboratory at the University’s faculty of engineering, Joel showed me how to make bananas burn.

He first mashes a pile of rotting skins and leaves. This pulp is then mixed with saw dust, compressed and dried to create briquettes that ignite readily and throw out a steady heat, ideal for cooking.

“The banana skins bind other materials together really well, they act like glue,” says Mr Chaney.

“We can then either form the material into a ball by hand, or use a press to squeeze the materials together and squeeze the liquid out.

“Once we’ve pressed them we can lay the briquettes outside in the sun, and within about two weeks we have some dried fuel.”

This fuel source is ideal for third world conditions because the briquettes can be made by hand, without any mechanical equipment. Using banana briquettes as fuel would help countries like Rwanda, Tanzania and Burundi keep forests intact. These countries currently rely on firewood for 80% of their fuel needs.

We are really blown away by the creativity and innovation that is happening right now in the alternative fuel industry. Add rotten bananas to the list of amazingly unexpected fuel sources that might collectively help us exit the age of reliance on fossil fuels.

Link [BBC News]

Google Deploys Street View Cameras on Trikes

Google Street View will soon include images of streets where cars aren’t allowed, thanks to a green and low-tech solution: mounting the cameras on a trike.

From Auto Blog Green via Groovy Green:

The three-wheeled, human-powered overgrown tricycles carry 250 pounds of ballast in the form of “a mounted Street View camera and a specially decorated box containing image collecting gadgetry,” says the internet giant. All that extra heft reportedly requires a “specially trained super fit” rider.

Google’s new trikes will be deployed first in Genoa, Italy, this spring. Assuming that launch proves successful, Google will send its pedal-powered cameras to the United Kingdom, where they’ll point their lenses towards a slew of famous British landmarks. Have a good one in mind? Google says its open to suggestions and will be working with VisitBritain to pick the most desirable locations to shoot.

Of course, not everyone has taken kindly to being subjected to the all-seeing eye of Google, and being on a trike instead of in a vehicle makes these drivers vulnerable to angry Japanese and British people.  But, at least they’re not on foot like this guy.

Link [Auto Blog Green] via [Groovy Green]

The World’s Greenest Roller Coaster is Pedal-Powered

It’s frightening enough to imagine taking a ride on a man-powered ferris wheel. However, a pedal-powered roller coaster takes the whole “eco amusement park” thing to new heights – literally.

The Skycycle at the Washuzan Highland Park in Okayama, Japan may not be a speed demon’s dream, but thrillseekers will still get a kick out of it considering that you’re basically riding a bike on a thin rail, dozens of feet above the ground on the side of a steep hill. Aside from the lights used to illuminate it at night, this ride uses zero electricity.

Sure, it probably won’t be showing up at Busch Gardens any time soon, but it’s always cool to see human-powered tech being used in innovative ways. Personally, you’d have to drug me to get me on this thing. The height is bad enough – add in rusty tracks and a flimsy seatbelt and my answer is hell to the no.

Link [Ecofriend]

All the Cool Kids Use Hand-Crank Gadgets

Solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy are certainly cool, but when it comes to small household items, sometimes the best form of energy you can use is your very own muscle power. Hand-crank gadgets and gear are a low-tech way to unplug many items in your home, from blenders and food processors to washing machines and even cell phone chargers. Here are a few examples of hand-crank tech that would be super-easy to integrate into your daily life.

SUPERBattery – This hand-powered charger for mobile devices will power up your cell phone, mp3 player, portable gaming devices and other gadgets without ever needing to be plugged in. The $30 system is best left for emergency situations since you only get 2 minutes of talk time on your cell for 6 minutes of cranking, but it’s a handy thing ot have around.

Wind n Go Freedom Shaver – You don’t have to resign yourself to being a hairy hippie just because you want to stop using your electric razor. This wind-up razor never needs batteries or electricity to charge – just crank it up and for $46 you’ll be beardless as a baby.

Hand Crank mp3 Player – If you feel like your arm muscles could use some definition, perhaps a hand-crank mp3 player is just what you need. 10 minutes of cranking equals the same amount of power generated by 50 minutes of charging via the USB cable. It has no screen, minimizing drain on the 3.5 hour cell-life, and has 1GB storage capacity. Cool idea, but it looks like it’s only available in Japan for now.

Bike Blender – Okay, so this is more leg-powered than hand-powered, but it’s still a cool off-grid gadget. The Bike Blender is available in both conventional and stationary models so you can either get some exercise in your backyard while whipping up some margaritas or prepare a smoothie while bicycling home from the store. Genius.

Wonder Wash – Hand wash your clothes without breaking your back. No need to bend over a tub for hours on end when you can simply throw your clothes into a bin with some water and soap, turn the handle for a few minutes and rinse. Voila, clean clothes without using any electricity at all in no time flat. Check out our recent review of this hand-crank washing machine.

How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air

You can dramatically increase the health of the air in your home, office buildnig or business with just a few plants. Research has shown that with only three varieties of plants, we can “grow our own fresh air” in indoor environments – the Areca palm, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue and the Money Plant.

This idea was tested at the Paharpur Business Centre and Software Technology Incubator Park in New Delhi, India where they filled the 20-year-old, 50,000 square foot building with 1,200 plants – 4 for every occupant. It has since been found that there is a 42% probability of increasing blood oxygen by 1% if one is inside the building for 10 hours, and incidences of eye irritation, respiratory symptoms, headache, lung impairment and asthma have decreased dramatically.

Surprisingly, one effect of placing so many plants in an indoor space was energy conservation. GreenSpaces found in an experiment that energy costs were reduced by an amazing 15%. They now plan to test this concept on an even larger scale, in a 1.75 million square foot building – using over 60,000 plants.

From GreenSpaces:

Kamal Meattle reported the results of his efforts to fill an office building with plants, in an effort to reduce headache, asthma, and other productivity-sapping aliments in thickly polluted India. After researching NASA documents, he concluded that a set of three particular common, waist-high houseplants—areca palm, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, and Money Plant—could be combined to scrub the air of carbon dioxide, formaldehyde and other pollutants.

At about four plants per occupant (1200 plants in all), the building’s air freshened considerably, and the health and productivity results were staggering. Eye irritation dropped by 52 percent, lower respiratory symptoms by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent and asthma by 9 percent. There were fewer sick days, employee productivity increased, and energy costs dropped by 15 percent.

GreenSpaces believes that the use of indoor plants could help reduce energy consumption around the world. By “growing” fresh air indoors, there’s less need for a constant supply of external fresh air in air-conditioned buildings.

Bringing plants indoors is such a mood helper, too – especially during the winter. You can keep the air you breathe cleaner & healthier, beautify your indoor space and brighten gloomy days just with a few inexpensive houseplants – who wouldn’t want that? We can’t wait to see what the results are of the test in the new GreenSpaces building.

Link [GreenSpaces]

Keep Warm the Low-Tech Way with Cute Hot Water Bottles

Chilly sheets and blankets in bed don’t exactly facilitate peaceful slumber during the winter. Turning up the heat can be wasteful, and really, it isn’t necessary – especially if you use a low-tech solution like a hot water bottle. These old-fashioned bed warmers are making a comeback in Japan where energy efficiency is a top priority.

Artist Janice Yan Yan Wu of Montreal, Canada creates these cute (in that ugly monster sort of way) little hand-sewn hot water bottle covers from recycled fabrics. Each little ‘character’ comes complete with a hot water bottle bladder inside, so you can fill it up with hot water, get your bed all warm and toasty and enjoy that heat all night.

Save energy, go low-tech and support handmade crafts! Check out Janice’s shop at Etsy.com.

Link [FromtoFrom]

Go Battery-Free with a Wind-Up Remote Control

How many remote controls are sitting on your coffee table right now? Those remotes aren’t just plastic pieces of junk, they also use up batteries. But, there’s no sense in getting up every time you want to change the channel, adjust the volume or pause the DVD you’re watching, so getting rid of them isn’t really an option – or is it? A new wind-up remote powers up to 6 gadgets at a time.

Just turn the dial on the front of the remote to charge it – thirty turns will keep it running for a full seven days. Mindlessly turn it while watching your favorite shows and you’re golden. It’s £19.53 (about $28.50) at Ethical Superstore.

If only it weren’t made of plastic, it would be awesome.

Link [Alternative Consumer] + [Ethical Superstore]

Man-Powered Ferris Wheel is Dangerously Green

Sometimes, low-tech is the best way to tackle a task, and sometimes it’s not. In this case, it may be really fun to watch, but Jesus, you’d have to pay me a lot of money to ride it: a man-powered ferris wheel. A group of about 5 men keep it going by jumping up on it and using their body weight to make it spin, one after the other.

Sure, it’s zero-emissions, but that thing is going awfully fast. And, safety inspectors here in the U.S. would take one look at that thing and condemn it. Watching the video, I was just waiting for one of those guys to get caught in the bars as the wheel turns. That would be painful.

Link [Environmental Graffiti] via [Really Natural]
Photo credit: Flickr user sourabhj via Environmental Graffiti

The Hamster-Powered Paper Shredder

Next time your kid asks for a hamster, put your reservations about stinky cedar bedding and the inevitable hamster funeral aside for a moment to consider what the little creature can do for you.  You might be pleased to learn that hamsters have the potential to be more than somewhat creepy, beady-eyed freeloaders that eat their own babies when left to mate and reproduce.  They can power your new eco-friendly paper shredder, saving you money and getting exercise at the same time.   Now if only someone would create a poodle-powered industrial version, we’d get a lot more done and wouldn’t have to walk our dogs, either.

Okay, so this isn’t a real product, and wouldn’t be all that efficient or animal-friendly if it were – it’s part of an installation at a Milan, Italy art gallery by artist Tom Ballhatchet.  But, hopefully it will get some wheels turning in inventors’ minds about (people-powered) manual tech.

Link [Technabob] via [ThisNext]

Rubber Ducks Deployed in Attempt to Track Melting Glacier

What was a rocket scientist’s solution to help figure out what’s happening inside the fastest-moving Greenland glacier? An army of rubber ducks.  It sounds like a joke, but a U.S. rocket scientist really did send 90 rubber ducks into the ice in the hopes that someone will find them if they emerge in Baffin Bay.

From Reuters:

“Right now it’s not understood what causes the glaciers themselves to surge in the summer,” Behar said. One theory is that the summer sun melts ice on the top glacial surface, creating pools that flow into tubular holes in the glacier called moulins.

The moulins can carry some water all the way to the underside of the glacier, where it acts as a lubricant to speed the movement of ice toward the coast. But because it cannot be seen, no one really knows what occurs.

That’s where the rubber ducks come in, along with a probe about the size of a football loaded with a GPS transmitter and instruments that can tell much about the glacier’s innards.

The ducks are labeled with the words ‘science experiment’ and ‘reward’ in three languages, along with an email address.  So far, they haven’t received any emails, but the places where the ducks might end up are pretty remote.

What an awesome idea – sort of low-tech (the rubber ducks), but high-tech (the probe) at the same time.  Who would have thought rubber ducks could play a part in global warming research?

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: EarthFirst composite – REUTERS/Konrad Steffen/University of Colorado/Handout

Making Cotton Candy with Pedal Power

No need for a fancy set-up when making cotton candy – street vendors in China have shown that it’s easy to do on a bike with a can of propane. The propane heats the sugar, and it’s spun using the pedals on the bike.  Smart, low-tech, pragmatic green design – we love it!

Link [Gizmodo]

New Study: Paint Your Roof White, Save the Planet

A recent study by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory scientists has revealed a simple, low-tech way that anyone can use to help cool the planet and reverse global warming: painting your roof white.  Everyone knows that white reflects heat, resulting in a cooling effect.  But, these scientists have put a number on it: according to Hashem Akbari, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, the average 1,000-square-foot roof could offset 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

From Machinist:

According to his data, roofs constitute 20 to 25 percent of urban surfaces, while pavement is about 40 percent. Therefore, if all of those surfaces were switched to a reflective material (or color) in the 100 largest urban areas in America, his calculations show, this would offset 44 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s more than all countries emit in a single year. Further, that’s worth about $1.1 trillion at current carbon trading rates.

Obviously, this is a rather large undertaking, but legislation requiring white on the roofs of buildings is one easy way to make sure that these effects are felt. As the Los Angeles Times reports, flat commercial buildings in California must have white roofs — a rule that’s been around since 2005. However, a new state law says sloped roofs on residential and commercial structures when constructed new or being retrofitted must have reflective coloring. This new rule takes effect in July 2009.

It makes sense.  There are an awful lot of dark-colored roofs out there absorbing heat – why not use this low-tech solution to reflect it instead? Obviously, this isn’t going to fix all of our problems, but it’s a step that a lot of people can take to help.

Read the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s press release to get all the details on the study.

Link [Machinist]
Photo credit: Flickr user Robert Whitlock

MIT’s Low-Tech Approach to Fixing the World

When award-winning MIT engineer Amy Smith visited the Peruvian village of Compone in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, she had a humble goal: turning the corncobs that the farmers use to power their cooking stoves and heat their homes into charcoal. The smoke produced from corncobs and other raw biomass is thick and dirty, making respiratory infections from indoor fires the leading cause of death for children under 5. Charcoal, on the other hand, burns much more cleanly. So Smith and two others lugged bags of tools and low-tech gadgets, water-testing equipment and a pedal-powered grain mill out to Compone from the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Popular Mechanics:

The charcoal project is the responsibility of Mary Hong, a 19-year-old branching out beyond her aerospace major this semester. She and the other students, coincidentally all women, are enrolled in Smith’s D-Lab, a course that is becoming quietly famous beyond the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. The D is for development, design and dissemination; last fall, more than 100 students applied for about 30 slots. To prepare for their field work, D-Lab students live for a week in Cambridge on $2 per day. (Smith joins in.) Right now, eight more D-Lab teams are plying jungle rivers, hiking goat trails and hailing chicken buses in seven additional countries—Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, India and China. In Smith’s view, even harsh aspects of Third World travel have their benefits. “If you get a good bout of diarrhea from a waterborne disease,” she says, “you really understand what it means to have access to clean drinking water.”

Smith succeeded in her charcoal goal, helping to further prove that improving standards of living in developing countries can be done with low-tech engineering on as little as $2 a day. Smith’s unique approach to hunger and other problems affecting people like the farmers of Compone has inspired a movement toward simple technology. Green, cheap and low tech – pure awesome.

Link [Popular Mechanics]