Amazon now has a ‘green’ category off of its electronics page. The products listed within have certifications from both EnergySar and EPEAT.
Note that this doesn’t mean that all of the products match up equally – there are different levels of ‘green’. For example, there are only 14 TVs that make the EPEAT silver level.
Nokia is still in 1st place in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics. The order of the 18 companies ranked here hasn’t changed much in the past 6 months, so apparently this list isn’t enough to shame them into changing their ways.
You can take a look at the list on their site, or pull down the full PDF.
Dell is one company that is at least trying to tackle the climate problem in whatever capacity they can. For example, here’s what I feel is a great idea: solar cell-lined shaded parking structures.
These ‘trees’ not only shade cars from the sun, but also collect and can power electrical outlets in the column, so you can plug in your electric car during the day.
Built by Envision Solar, hopefully we’ll see many more of these in company parking lots across the world.
As you know, we love featuring ‘green’ and/or environmentally related advances in technology, and here’s another. This time, a team in the Department of Materials Science at MIT have devised a roof tile that changes its surface reflectivity depending on the temperature.
In a nutshell, at low temps, it absorbs as much sunshine and heat as it can, while at high temps, it is more reflective. Fantastic. Nicknamed the Thermeleon, these roof tiles could save 20% on cooling costs.
We may not have reached a real substantive climate agreement in Copenhagen this past week, but thankfully this is not stopping companies around the world from making steps towards improving our dire environmental state. Take Panasonic for example, which is testing out ideas for an eco-friendly house that may actually produce more energy than it uses. Now that would be novel!
Aptly dubbed the Eco Ideas House, it includes things like vacuum insulation, LED lighting, hydrogen fuel cells, and of course, smart monitoring & control systems [pictured]. The folks at DVICE took a tour and wrote about it.
As you well know, most of the time you flush the toilet, you’re flushing water and money down the drain needlessly. What’s really needed on toilets is a 2nd button that only uses half the water. Brondell’s Perfect Flush product retrofits your toilet to have that 2nd button without you having to go out and buy and install a whole new toilet.
The Perfect Flush toilet retrofit kit can be installed by anyone and takes about 30 minutes. If you use the calculator on their website, even with average usage and costs plugged in the Perfect Flush will save a family of 4 enough money on their water bill to pay for itself within a year. If your costs and usage are higher, for example, if your toilet water tanks are larger, then you savings go up. What’s more important is that you are doing your bit to save the environment as well.
Ideally, those newer toilets should also really have an adjustment to regulate how much water is used per flush and Perfect Flush has that as well. Eco-friendly Perfect Flush is compatible with most toilet tanks ranging in types and sizes 1.28 through 7+ gallon per flush.
Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: $92.89
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
Wow. A plane that actually runs on solar energy?! The Solar Impulse just did its first taxi tests, all completely on solar power. So far, they were low-speed and not that impressive. What’s impressive is that it was run completely on solar power. This holds great promise for the future.
Southwest has unveiled a ‘greener’ Boeing 733-700 airplane that will serve as a test for potentially fleet-wide changes. The plane uses: recyclable carpet, lighter seat covers, lighter life vest pouches and seat foam .
The weight reduction is about 5lbs per seat and about 500lbs total for a savings of 9500 gallons of fuel per year. Well done Southwest.
Typical central air systems for homes have a fatal flaw – a single thermostat for the entire floor if not the entire house. You then typically end up with different rooms being at different temperatures.
Today’s technology lets you manage this problem cheaply. Snag a bunch of wireless sensors and deploy them around the home. They in turn report back to a central system that you can monitor to figure out where you may need to improve the insulation and/or adjust the airflow into that room.
You may be able to take it a step further by having the vents motorized and automatically controlled to open/close based on temperature thresholds.
You can find more details at Embedded.com.
Greenpeace’s latest edition (12th) of their Guide to Greener Electronics still has Nokia at the top with Samsung and Sony Ericsson rounding out the top 3. Holding extremely poor scores, Nintendo, Lenovo, Fujitsu and Microsoft are at the bottom of the 17 company list. While this isn’t meant to be an all out examination of every electronics manufacturer out there, covering the top vendors makes sense as they would contribute directly or indirectly to pollution and environmental damage.
Greenpeace has the latest rankings at their website, and you can download the full report in PDF format as well.
