Posted by Greenbang on September 26th, 2007
Green Rocket PR (Big up to ya boys) sent us info of a London event on climate change.
If you’ve got an event, tell us about it and we’ll publish it.
This one is LONDON AWARE 08 - an environmental expo taking place at the city’s Barbican Centre on the 10th and 11th of May 2008.
Big Green Switch will be there, plus a load of other people in the green space.
“The event will cover every area of sustainable living both at work and at home from advice on ethical investment, to the latest hybrid vehicles and renewable energy systems on the market.
Now its organisers are calling on support from businesses and offering them an opportunity to get involved with this groundbreaking event at a grassroots level.
For more information or to receive a sponsorship package please contact the team on 0845 458 8350 or email sponsor@ukaware.com.”
Posted by Greenbang on September 26th, 2007
Greenbang saw this the other day:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that average global temperatures could increase by as much as 6.4C if carbon emissions continue to rise - much higher than previously thought.”
Keep it in mind when the oil companies claim they’re doing their best to look into alternative energies…
Posted by Greenbang on September 26th, 2007
Ooh - look at the angry man.
Alex Rabbetts is MD of Migration Solutions. He sat down to write something for Greenbang, which we thought was quite cool, even if it is a bit angry and about erm, data centres.
So here it is - Get ready for: Environmental altruism or just common sense?
As Planet Earth slides gloomily towards a deepening environmental catastrophe, it seems as though we cannot move without our social consciences being stabbed from messages such as Recycle! Regenerate! Cut waste! Kyoto! Live Earth! Go green! Offset your carbon! As a backdrop to this relentless barrage of messages, we are constantly fed images of a black, apocalyptic future that our children’s children and their goldfish will have to endure - if we’ve not inadvertently made them extinct by then.
On a personal level, there are simple steps that we can take – recycle household rubbish, take the bus and leave the car at home, turn your spud peelings and left-overs into compost, but when it comes to the grown up stuff and the infrastructure that the country depends upon, does this thinking go out of the window? …
Posted by Greenbang on September 26th, 2007
Premier Farnell, a distributor of electronic components, is to award some lucky sausage $100,000 if they can win the ‘Live Edge’ – Electronic Design for the Global Environment competition.
“Electronics engineers, students and academics around the world are invited to submit designs for an innovative product that utilises electronic components and has a positive impact on the environment, for example by increasing energy efficiency or reducing carbon emissions. Full details are available at: www.live-edge.com
The winning entrant will receive a cash prize of US $50,000 as well as the support to move the design towards production. The support package, estimated to be worth an additional US $50,000, will include the services of an electronic design consultancy that will develop the design to prototype stage, assistance with legal matters and IP registration, marketing and publicity, as well as Premier Farnell’s help in securing investment funding. The group will actively market the end product to millions of customers globally through their leading edge web page, catalogue and direct marketing.
In addition, up to five entrants will be eligible for ‘honourable mentions’, each receiving a cash prize of US $5,000.
The closing date for registration is October 31st 2007 and entries must be submitted by November 30th 2007. The competition is open to anyone aged 18 or over and the winner will be announced in January 2008.
Posted by Greenbang on September 26th, 2007
PolyFuel, a company that makes membranes for fuel cells, says it has made a tiny fuel cell that can give twice the power a laptop needs to run.
Check out this pic for size.
What that means in English is they’ve made a very small fuel cell (funky battery that runs on different, er fuels) that has a lot of power.
This one, they say, provides 500 watts per litre of methanol it uses.
“In layman’s terms, explained Voss, this means that long-running fuel cell power supplies of a size and weight attractive to consumers, and that physically integrate with a laptop in the same fashion as today’s Lithium ion batteries, are technically within reach.
Fuel cells can be thought of as “refillable” batteries. But unlike a battery, which when exhausted must be recharged or discarded, fuel cells will run continuously, as long as there is fuel available. As conceived by most consumer electronics manufacturers, many of whom have aggressive fuel cell development programs, the consumer would simply “pop in” a replacement cartridge of methanol fuel when necessary. Spare, lightweight, plastic cartridges – made readily available in convenience stores – could be carried in ones pocket or purse. Eight to ten hours of laptop runtime per cartridge is a common industry goal.
The membrane is the heart of the fuel cell, and the various layers of the sandwich are designed to deliver fuel and air to as much membrane surface area as possible, while diffusing away moisture and CO2 byproducts. Certain layers additionally provide a current path to carry off electrons produced at the membrane’s surface. This current is used to power the portable device. PolyFuel’s 56 Watt stack has a volume of just over 111 cubic centimeters (see photo).
Posted by Greenbang on September 25th, 2007
You learn something new every day.
“According to the World Health Organisation, IAP claims the lives of 1.5 million people a year worldwide, or one person every 20 seconds. Women and children make up the vast majority of these deaths due to their increased exposure in the home.”
The Shell Foundation and US environmental nonprofit body Envirofit International are teaming up to reduce this number.
They’re investing $25m in work to cut this.
Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) is the smoke generated by traditional fires and stoves used in developing world homes.
Apparently more than three billion people, or almost half the world’s population, cook in their homes using traditional fire and stoves, burning biomass fuels like wood, dung and crop waste. Day in and out families breathe in lethal fumes from these cooking fires.
“This new partnership is part of the Foundation’s mission to see 10 million clean-burning stoves sold in five countries over the next five years. The Foundation is providing Envirofit with investment and organisational support to form an independent global entity. In turn, Envirofit International, working with their technology partner Colorado State University’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, will design, develop, market and distribute clean cookstoves that are engineered to emit significantly less toxic emissions and use less fuel.”
Posted by Greenbang on September 25th, 2007
CHINA WATCH It’s Mid-Autumn day, a Chinese traditional festival that celebrates the harvest and family gathering.
And it is our Chinese tradition to eat moon cakes, but the over-packaging of the moon cakes seems to bring a lot of waste. After Mid-Autumn Day, people throw away tons of moon cake boxes.
Over-packaging moon cakes has raised controversy this year. A Chinese article on the Xinmin Newspaper calls for simpler or even no packaging.
Greenbang once received a box of moon cakes with four layers of packaging - a paper box outside, then a metal box, then silk, then plastic, and finally the moon cake appeared.
Take a look at this huge and fancy package with only six small moon cakes in it.
It looks like most of the money spent on moon cakes is for packaging.
Posted by Yan Yan on September 25th, 2007
There’s a growing list of companies and tools that promise to help your firm figure out its carbon emissions and chop them down. And now BT has added its name to it.
As its announcement reads:
BT’s carbon impact assessment enables organisations to accurately calculate the amount of CO2 emissions produced as a result of the use of networked IT services. It also provides a set of workable solutions to help customers reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint.
And BT itself seems to have signed up for the service. It’s something of an electricity guzzler itself, accounting (by its own admission) for 0.7% of the UK’s entire electricity consumption. But it reckons it will chop out carbon to the tune of 300,000 households (or Liverpool and Cardiff combined) every year until 2010. Good stuff chaps.
Posted by Yan Yan on September 25th, 2007
Sun Microsystems, best known for making large servers that get stuck in corporate basements, has launched an online community site called OpenEco to help firms track and compare energy use.
As the site explains: “OpenEco is a new global on-line community that provides free, easy-to-use tools to help participants assess, track, and compare business energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation.”
The hope is that firms will start to open up and share their data, in order to benchmark themselves against others.
And that’s about all we have to say about that. Let us know if you’ve tried it out.
Posted by Yan Yan on September 25th, 2007
US retail giant Wal-Mart has announced a new scheme to measure the greenhouse gases emitted across its supply chain.
It will work in partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project to figure this all out–and the move means that up to 60,000 companies dealing with Wal-Mart could be asked to calculate their emissions. For the moment though, the pilot programme will focus on key essentials, such as toothpaste, vacuum cleaners–and beer.
Although the company isn’t usually feted as a green pioneer, the move makes sense for it, because cutting emissions typically leads to costs cuts–something it definitely is a leader in. As an aside, one of Greenbang’s American colleagues recently visited the team in London and spent several minutes waxing lyrical about the prices at Wal-Mart (to the general astonishment of the locals).
And if the firm’s nice words can be believed, there’s a lot more to come from all this:
“This is an important first step toward reaching our goal of removing non-renewable energy from the products Wal-Mart sells,” said John Fleming, executive vice president and chief merchandising officer, Wal-Mart Stores Division. “This is an opportunity to spur innovation and efficiency throughout our supply chain that will not only help protect the environment but save people money at the same time.”
