Secret Still

For those of you in or near the Bay Area this weekend, Saturday will see the launching of the first Carrotmob mission. The CM has partnered with K & D market on 16th and Guerrero in San Francisco to provide the stage for their inaugural attempt. The mission is to go to the store from noon until 2:30ish and buy as much as you can. 22% of the revenue generated from this little shopping burst will be put into energy saving measures and renovations to make the store more environmentally friendly. This is the first of many Carrotmob missions aimed at using the collective buying power of individuals to help small businesses incorporate sustainable and environmentally sound practices. Think of it as becoming a shareholder in the environment. That is damn clever.

Carrotmob

MPK Co. has created tiny, light-emitting, glass spheres that last up to 12 years. They’re filled with a radioactive gas, but the radiation doesn’t penetrate the glass walls of the spheres. It’s not effected by heat or cold, and is 5,000lbs crush resistant. Cost to light up an 8.5 x 11 piece of plastic: .35 cents.

Litroenergy profile

Can reduce emissions from the train by as much as 50%! Nice. If it wasn’t too little, too late from a polluting behemoth I would be really happy. It’s still a nice project.

Hybrid Locomotive.

The number of computers and other digital components being produced these days is baffling. And it should come as no surprise then that these products produce a lot of waste from excess materials and whatnot. One of the biggest problems is all the silicon left over from making chips. Each chip is pressed from a silicon wafer, but all of the remainder silicon is just tossed out. IBM recently announced that they have pioneered a new process for repurposing the excess silicon into solar panels. They didn’t just take a waste material and turn it into more products; they took a waste material and turned it into a product that greatly reduces the need for pollution causing energy sources. Well damn, IBM. This, coupled with the other advances in solar technology, could reduce the cost of solar panels to the “I can afford that” range. Nerds are just killing it lately.

Watch the video and then read about it here.

Green resource and all around interesting site Inhabitat has a really nice article up today about William Kamkwamba. Name doesn’t ring a bell? I’m not surprised. Positive press usually gets filtered out in favor of the horrific. I heard about him a little bit ago thanks to my close watch on the TED conference. William, without any training, taught himself all he could out of books borrowed from a school library. One of the things he learned was how to make a windmill, which he did, out of found materials. He used the windmill to support his family’s moderate power needs and continues to do so, improving the windmill whenever possible. His little project garnered him enough acclaim that he was invited to be one of 100 speakers at the international TED conference. Not bad for a poor kid from Malawi. Plus I think he’s wearing skate shoes in that photo, so we could definitely be bros.

William Kamkwamba on Inhabitat
William’s Windmill Blog

The American Institute of Architects has selected the Top 10 Green Projects for the year, and they’re all worth looking at. Ranging from modular family homes to research buildings to offices, all of the selected projects rate a platinum on the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) scorecard, which makes them all super efficient and pretty self-sufficient as far as water and power usage goes. I was so impressed that I looked into jobs with every winner, but of course I’m qualified for pretty much nothing. I guess I’ll just have to get rich and build a platinum home of my own.

AIA Top 10 Green Projects
U.S. Green Building Council
American Institute of Architects

On My Desk is a pretty fascinating glimpse into the studios of artists and designers from around the world. Most people never stop to think what the environment was like where a certain painting was created. The artist is important and so is the painting, but so is the space surrounding them both. Plus the voyeuristic part of me loves to see inside other people’s houses.

On My Desk

First off let me tell you a quick fact about me: I drive a truck. A big, 18 MPG, nowhere-near-California-emissions-compliant, badass truck, and I love it. I love it so much that driving anything except my truck or a truck of equal or greater size always makes me feel like I’ve let the side of my family who distill their own liquor down. But that doesn’t meant that I hate the Earth; as a matter of fact I quite like the Earth. My house is there. But the conversion to biodiesel is around $10K if done professionally and $15K if I try to do it myself, because I will fuck it up royally. This is all just to let you know that I will never happily drive a Chevy Volt. I would consider getting one in addition to my truck though.

Chevrolet has jumped into the electric car pool (pun mildly intended) with its pants off and no sunscreen on. They’ve created a car that can’t be created. The Volt, as fantastic a car as any yet proposed, requires a LiIon battery that no one has been able to make, due to its necessity for durability and long life. Don’t let that cloud over the Volt’s positive aspects, and they are many.

The first, and most dramatic, feature of Chevy’s electric car is that it doesn’t require any special power station to charge itself. All you need is a standard 110V wall outlet (most garages have at least on pair) and 6.5 hours. That’ll get you 40 miles, which is more than it seems considering the average daily commute of most motorists falls well under that distance. But let’s say you have a longer commute or have heavy traffic or just have a lot of errands to run after work. No worries, Chevy replies. The E-Flex system that Chevy has developed (all except the battery) uses the 12 gallon gas tank to charge the battery while driving extending the full range of the car to 640 miles per charge/tank. You don’t even have to use regular gasoline to fill the tank. The engine itself is fuel flexible for ethanols up to E85. Say hello to your new biodiesel car.

The car itself is well designed and innovative from every angle, but is still labeled a concept. That just goes back to the battery problem. However, Chevy does plan on mass producing the car so look for it in a few years just when the oil reserve is giving out and you are looking around at which one of your neighbors you can kill to survive.

To learn more about The Chevy Volt check out the AutoBlogGreen coverage.

See how the Volt stacks up against GM’s previous half-hearted attempt at electric automotives here.

And find out more than you will ever need to know about the car here.

My thanks to AutoBlogGreen for the image and the interest.