Back in 1993, Markus and Daniel Freitag decided to start making designer, functional messenger bags and accessories in Switzerland and the rest is history. All the accessories and bags you’ll find at Freitag are made using post-consumer recycled materials:
Car Safety Belts
Truck Tarps
Airbags
Bike Inner Tubes
The coolest part is you can go to their website and design your own bag from different truck tarps. Check out our greenwix design shenanigans:
Luxim has developed a new lightbulb that’s about the size of a christmas light but heats to over 6000 degrees Kelvin (10,000 degrees Fahrenheit).
With great heat comes great responsibility - this little christmas light can generate more light than a streetlight. They have received over $400 million in venture capital funds which kind of proves that this green revolution is not a fad. So to revise the hierarchy:
Here’s an interesting gadget from British inventor Tom Lawton that uses wind power to generate electricity to power a lamp. Thankfully, all that functionality is included in a single, stand-alone device…just hang it up and you’re ready to enjoy the forthcoming “glow” (judging by the video, light would seemingly be a bit of an overstatement). Nevertheless, a cool gadget that requires surprisingly little wind (~3mph) to work.
Definitely worth considering if you’re looking for some outdoor mood-lighting. They’re taking pre-orders now for around $200 and will ship late summer.
Scientists at Swansea University in the UK have come up with a new way of capturing solar energy by applying photovoltaic “paint” to steel surfaces. Now, we’ve seen print-on solar, so let’s take it a step further and scale out a bit.
This paint-on solution is not quite as efficient (offering about 5% efficiency for the sun’s input energy), but it is certainly a bit easier to implement. Another “limitation” if you will, is the need for a steel surface, which is not a very common building material for single homes, but is used extensively in commercial buildings. Think giant warehouses, that are usually very expensive (monetarily and environmentally) to keep lit, climate controlled…etc.
“Corus Colours produces around 100 million square metres of steel building cladding a year. If this was treated with the photovoltaic material, and assuming a conservative 5% energy conversion rate, then we could be looking at generating 4,500 gigawatts of electricity through the solar cells annually. That’s the equivalent output of roughly 50 wind farms.” (Dr. Woolsey, the man in charge)
No word yet on cost of production, or what the actual manufacturing method (other than paint applied to rollers applied to steel) for this product will be, but it should be quite interesting in the future. What about charging up your Prius while it sits in the parking lot? Sports stadiums, cargo ships…lots of possibilities here.
USBCells are revolutionary rechargeable batteries that don’t need the charger. From the picture it’s pretty easy to see that they are rechargable AA batteries with a built in USB port that charges the battery. Use them like regular batteries but when they are depleted, simply plug them into your computer or even your iPod USB charger and you should be good to go in about 5 hours.
The USBCells are NiMH which don’t suffer from memory effect - which means you should be able to get hundreds of charges out of them. You can also charge them with a standard NiMH charger if you are so inclined for those rare moments when you have access to a rechargeable batter charger and not a computer.
The USBCells are starting to come out in all battery sizes and configurations and because of the wide appeal, you should be able to see these popping up in Staples and Target soon enough.
Other uses for this technology? How come cell phones don’t have built in USB adapters like these simple AA batteries do? That means you wouldn’t have to ever worry about carrying a charger OR phantom energy drain cheaply made chargers are notorious for. I think the first cell phone with that will sell millions, are you listening Nokia, LG, Apple, and Motorola?
This Pear Lighting concept, by Nick Foley, is one of the coolest lighting concepts to come along in a long time. If you look carefully, you can see that this lighting sculpture is a modern lamp - notice the on/off switch at the bottom left. As if not marvelous enough, the Pear Light also features some great innovations.
Each of the Pear globes contain 10 LEDs, which if you remember the hierarchy of energy and planet friendly, goes Sun > LED > CFL >> Incandescent. But wait, there’s more! The three Pear globes are attached to the light with rare earth magnets which allow the lucky owner to “pick” the pear off the tree for up to an hour of continuous light.
Who needs romantic candles anymore, take the Pear globes straight to the bedroom. Impress at your next party or stay safe during your next blackout. The possibilities are endless.
The Nokia 3110 Evolve is an ecofriendly handset. It utilizes recycled and biomaterials to ‘evolve’ the original Nokia 3110. According to Nokia, this will be the first of many ecofriendly handsets they are coming out with. The best feature of this handset is probably its intelligent charging which only uses electricity when the Evolve is charging. Contrary to popular misconception, those appliances you leave plugged in but not turned on still drain energy. Intelligent charging technology is trying to put an end to that.
A concept mobile, developed by Dutch designer Gert-Jan van Breugel, has casing made of some fancy biodegradeable “bio-plastic” and renewable, resilient bamboo.
Don’t get too excited, you can’t just chuck it in the woods when you’re done, you’ve got to remove the battery, antenna, and print board before tossing it. That may sound like a lot of work, but the following stat from core77’s site makes it seem a bit more significant:
One billion handsets produced globally each year and only 10% recycled. Average mobile phone user replaces their handset every 18 months. This has a big impact on the environment; 36kg of CO2 is used to make one 90g phone.
It’s also got an on-board crank to help reduce the drain on your local power grid and bamboo seeds so when you do strip it down and chuck it in the woods, it’ll grow you some bamboo.
One of the first items to get me excited about ecofriendly gadgets and stealing free energy from the sun is the Solio. It is one of the most popular solar powered gadgets to date. The Solio is a small device that can fit in your pocket but then “blossom” into a three pedaled solar flower.
It was named one of National Geographic’s Best of Gear and has been making its rounds on CNN and other news stations. The Solio is able to charge up your cell phone, mp3 player, gps device, and other small gadgets that don’t require too much power. Solio claims that with an hour of sunshine, you can have twenty minutes of talk time or 50 minutes of MP3 music.
Perhaps the most intriguing uses of the Solio lie in remote areas. With a donated Solio and cell phone, remote villages with no power, let alone phone lines, can connect with emergency services and doctors when the need arises.
If you haven’t been swayed by the siren song of the iPhone, shrouded in crappy Cingular… er… AT&T Wireless service, then you should take a serious look at Credo Mobile. Credo Mobile taps into the Sprint Network so you don’t need to worry about reliability issues with a boutique wireless company.
In 2007, Credo donated $3,514, 240 to various non-profits. It’s an impressive list and you can find it here. What’s important to note is that 1% of charges gets set aside, not 1% of profits. This is so significant because if a company claims to donate a percentage of profits, they do so after all the expenses are paid and the accountants do their special voodoo. That could mean a company makes $100 million annually, makes $1000 profit, and donates a total of $10 to the causes - kind of misleading.
Back to the good stuff - you can get an LG 150 with a Solio for $69 + a service plan. For those of you not familiar with the Solio, it is one of the most popular personal solar devices out there and it is the topic of my next blog post. The service plans are also pretty comparable to all the major wireless providers out there.
(Rock the vote!)
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