Science & Technology

Everything’s “eco” these days. Which, in many ways, is a good thing. Many consumers think in terms of energy savings and environmental impact, and many manufacturers are now thinking the same way. Although, sometimes the manufacturers are thinking only in terms of advertising slogans and not really changing the products they sell.

It’s also easy to be caught up in the “new eco-technology” hype. For instance, the new eco-toaster design from Nahamer:

It supposedly uses 50% less energy while toasting your bread 20% faster. And, it’s specifically designed to be repaired rather than tossed out and replaced. I’m guessing that, at first, such a technological marvel may be more expensive than regular toasters — $200 anyone? And of course, such cutting-edge thinking takes time to get to market, so this toaster is just in the concept stage.

But is it really any different than this:

Available at Amazon.com from Black & Decker for $49.95. Seems like the exact same product, minus the eco-hype!

The electric car has been around for longer then most people think. The “EV 1″ by General Motors was the first modern production electric vehicle from a major automaker and also the first purpose-built electric car produced by GM in the United States. But why are we still driving gasoline powered vehicle if electric technology has been around for a while. There is a very simple answer to that question: oil companies!

More to come on this subject in august with the firs episode of talkgreenTV.

In this video Moblogic.tv talks about the the reality of buying an electric car today. The choices are limited and expensive. Electric cars have been roaming around more than a decade. So the question is; Are we there yet?

In the Israeli desert, a US-israeli team is testing a new technology that uses mirrors to harness the sun’s rays and create electricity-producing steam.

So, let’s imagine you’re all set to take the next step in your conversion to green living. Instead of driving to work, you’ve decided to ride your bike, giving yourself some much-needed exercise, bypassing the consumption of precious petroleum, sparing the earth a few tons of greenhouse-gas exhaust fumes (except for the carbon dioxide that you huff-and-puff out of your own lungs), and doing your small part to reduce traffic. Great!

But what about the bike itself? Its manufacture produced its own share of greenhouse gases, it used up more of the earth’s metals, and if it’s any kind of decent bike, it’ll probably be stolen eventually. Perhaps you’ve made the wrong decision.

Unless you take this approach:

Young Phil Bridge, a soon-to-be-graduating student at England’s Sheffield Hallam University, was concerned about the frequent theft of bikes in the U.K. So he decided to make himself some two-wheeled transportation out of recycled and easily recyclable materials. A cardboard bike!

Now pretty is isn’t. A chick magnet it most certainly is not. (Although the same could have been said about the Prius, and now it’s a status symbol for Leo DiCaprio and others.) But the bike is made (mostly) of an easily renewable resource, and supposedly cost only $30. The tires, wheels, chain and gears are made from standard metal parts. Oh, and the seat, too. I’m hoping there wasn’t even a test-prototype with a cardboard seat. Ouch.

Regular box cardboard isn’t strong enough, so Bridge used something called hexacomb cardboard, which has the additional utility of being waterproof. I’m not sure I’d want to be the one to test this claim by taking this thing for a ride in the rain.

The bike will hold anyone who weighs less than 168 lbs, and Bridge, who made the bike as part of his degree program in Product Design, is looking for investors to try and sell the bike commercially. I can see and hear the ads now, to the tune of the Beatles “Paper Back Writer” — “Paper Bike Rider.”

There’s a scene in the movie Fargo that just doesn’t work for me.  Now don’t get me wrong — I love the movie.  Its smorgasbord of despair, violence and hopelessness always brings a smile to my face.  To me, it’s a perfect movie — except for one little thing.  Remember when Jerry Lundegaard (the excellent William H. Macy) has to scrape the ice off his car windshield in the middle of a big frozen empty parking lot?  He just grabs the scraper and goes at it.  I always think to myself — hey, everyone knows that in cold weather, when you have to scrape ice, you start the car and blast the heat!  Not only does it warm up the car while you are scraping, it might also help melt the windshield ice!

I grew up near Boston, that’s how I know this.  But why is it important to an environmental discussion website, you might ask?  Because I hope that one of the things I bring to the site is a healthy sense of skepticism.  And because my upbringing in a cold part of the US qualifies me to say: this thing, pictured below, is useless.

I mean, granted, it doesn’t use gasoline like a regular snowplow, so I say: nice try to Kevin Blake of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.

But come on.  Here’s video of the thing in action:

http://www.c3ktogo.com/news-video/?mgid=14769

Look at the snow he’s happily plowing!  It’s light and fluffy, and only about 4-6 inches deep.  How often does that happen?

More often, if my childhood is any indication, poor Mr. Blake steps out of his house on a cold winter morning to find 3 feet of heavy, wet snow clinging to his driveway.  He dutifully saddles up on the old pedal-plow, heads out into the snow, and thuds to an immediate stop.  No matter how hard he pedals.

Then he calls the local guy with a plow on the front of his truck.  Right?

Almost everyone who’s anyone in Hollywood drives a Mercedes or a BMW.  The occassional wanna-be Lexus or Acura crops up, as does the odd heavily advertised sporty Cadillac.  But for those who want to stand out from the crowd as environmentally conscious, the car of choice is the Prius.  (I myself drive one, proving it can’t be THAT hip.)

But that may all change in the next year or two with the introduction of the all-electric CIty from Think in Norway.

A cute but sporty little two-seater the size of a Smart Car, the Think City will be sold in limited numbers in Southern California starting next year, according to the LA Times.

Purporting to have a range of 112 miles, the City will roll off the assembly line in Aurskog, Norway next year at a less-than-GM-nervous-making 44 vehicles per day, or about 10,000 per year.

The first thing you gotta think when you see the City is, of course — man is this thing gonna crumple like an origami swan when anything hits it going more than five miles an hour?  Well apparently it meets both US and European safety standards.  But I say let’s see the youtube videos of the crash tests before we believe it.

Still, it’s an exciting idea, the first mass-produced genuine electric car in the US.  How soon until Ed Begley Jr. and Leo DiCaprio appear in the pages of US Magazine at the wheel of one of these babies?

At a cost of perhaps as high as $35,000, they might be the only ones for a while.

Those of us who read and write on talkgreen want to think we’re fairly environmentally savvy. That as the years go by, we’ll keep trying to find ways to live that are easy on Mother Earth? And we’ll continue those habits right up until the day we die, right?

Well what about after that?

Greensprings Natural Cemetery has the answer.

Now you can follow your environmental bliss right into the grave! Greensprings (http://naturalburial.org/index.php) is a one hundred acre nature preserve in rural New York State, a beautiful bit of rolling hillsides and grassy fields not to far from Ithaca. There you can purchase a plot in which to be buried. But this is no rows-of-depressing-headstones type of place. Each plot is 15×15 and is meant to revert back to nature once you are deposited in the dirt. You can plant a tree, or a bush, or some flowers to mark the place if you want. And, if you really are a traditionalist, your final resting place can sport a flagstone marker. But it must be small, made of local stone, and flush to the ground.

The result is, judging from the pictures, a much more peaceful place that a normal cemetery, a place you wouldn’t mind having a picnic or getting rained on.

And if that’s not natural enough for you, check out the Natural Burial Company (http://www.naturalburialcompany.com/). There you’ll find a wide array of biodegradable caskets. They come in natural wood (no pressboard or plywood please), wicker (if you’re interested in feeling like you’re getting buried in your patio furniture), and the ultra-modern recyled paper “ecopod” (see below).

Here’s hoping when our time comes, we’ll do the right thing for the earth, because at that point we’re about to become part of it.

I read an article online today claiming that researchers in the UK had discovered a way to wash clothes using only approximately 1 cup of water!  Here’s the article:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/media/press_releases/current/washing_machine.htm

They claim that the clothes not only get just as clean, with lipstick and coffee stains removed, but also come out of the washer practically dry, eliminating the need for dryers.  If this is true, this technology should catch on like wildfire.  The savings of not having to use much water, not having to heat much water, and not having to dry clothes by gas or electric would be environmentally and financially huge.

But here’s the catch, maybe.  The new cleaning technique involves “the use of plastic granules (or chips) tumbled with the clothes to help clean them.”  Granules — that sounds an awful lot like dirt, doesn’t it?  And how do I get these little plastic thingies out of my clothes?  Aren’t I just going to keep finding hundreds of them in my pockets?  The article doesn’t say.

Reminds me a little bit of a comedian who, in the eighties, did a bit about beer shampoo.  Remember beer shampoo?  This guy said, beer: isn’t that what I’m trying to wash out of of my hair?