All Entries in the "Technology and Gadgets" Category
What Does HP’s Post-PC Move Mean for Green IT?
The computing giant’s CEO announced a major shift in strategy last week, away from the consumer electronics market and into business services — a move that echoes IBM’s transition from six years ago.
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[Source: GreenBiz.com Green and Sustainable Business News - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
Panasonic to Double Down on Green Products, Takeback Locations
Panasonic Corporation of North America has unveiled new goals to lower the impact of its products as well as its offices.
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[Source: GreenBiz.com Green and Sustainable Business News - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
Towards Greener Electronics
The third annual survey from Greenpeace scores 44 products across seven categories of electronics for their environmental impacts.
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[Source: GreenBiz.com Green and Sustainable Business News - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
ULE Creates Sustainability Standard for Cell Phones
Cell phone makers are getting a standard to determine how sustainable their products are.
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[Source: GreenBiz.com Green and Sustainable Business News - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
A Look at Green Chemistry’s Efforts to Reinvent How We Make Products
Green chemistry seeks to transform the way products are made, reducing or eliminating the unknown, and potentially harmful, substances that are used in manufacturing. At the same time, green chemistry can lower risk and provide a competitive advantage to companies that embrace it.
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[Source: GreenBiz.com Green and Sustainable Business News - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
The Pioneering Past and Future of HP’s Sustainability Efforts
The world’s largest technology company has been a model of sustainability since its inception, and HP’s chief steward of environmental responsibility explains where its green mission is taking the firm.
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[Source: GreenBiz.com Green and Sustainable Business News - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
Google Maps adds bicycle information
Beginning today, Google has begun providing bicycle directions for its Google Maps service with directions for cyclists in 150 cities in the United States. Google already incorporates public-transit and walking directions in addition to automobile driving directions, and the bicycling community has been calling for Google to add bike routes for some time.
Bloom Energy: Should you believe the hype?
The clean tech news of the week is going to be dominated by Bloom Energy‘s emergence from stealth. I can hardly believe that it was almost four years ago that I first wrote about Bloom. Reading that 2006 EcoGeek article, I’m proud to say that we got got the broad picture right, but the details are still tantalizing.
Bloom Energy’s current product is a relatively inexpensive and versatile fuel cell that can power roughly 100 American homes. The devices cost $700,000 a piece an are roughly twice as efficient as natural gas power transmitted through the grid. They’ve sold a bunch of these boxes (with hefty federal and state subsidies) to a bunch of large businesses in California, including Google, eBay, FedEx, WalMart and Staples. The boxes are busy creating “clean” energy as we speak.
Bloom has finally opened the doors to its operation to the press, allowing 60 Minutes a walk-through of their facility as well as providing interviews with the CEO of eBay and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. But I put “clean” in quotation marks because, despite the fact that the words “carbon dioxide” are never mentioned, Bloom Boxes still pump CO2 into the atmosphere, albeit far less than a traditional grid-scale natural gas plant would.
Bloom’s energy is certainly cleaner energy, but while they’re busy comparing themselves to solar power and wind, they’re not true clean energy unless they use bio-gas. I applaud them for using bio-gas when they can, but there simply isn’t enough of the stuff to power Bloom Boxes on a significant scale.
But let’s not spend too much time arguing about whether “cleaner” counts as “clean.” In my book, this is certainly good enough.
Bloom’s true potential is in super-charging the distributed power system. Bloom (very optimistically) wants to shrink its box (in size and cost) so that every American can have one in their basement for around $3000. The box would power the entire house, basically making a connection to the grid a convenience, not a necessity. This may not seem important until we realize that up to half of the power produced at a power plant is lost in transit.
Bloom Energy might also help power the developing world without expensive power infrastructure just as cell phones have created a cheap communications infrastructure.
Bloom’s goals are lofty and it may be that distributed power is going to be a long time in coming if it comes at all, but while they’re doing a great job of making this revelation sound more important than it is in the short term, the chance remains that this could actually be a very big deal.
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[Source: Yahoo! Green: TECHNOLOGY - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
Highly efficient CO2-capturing crystals
Scientists at UCLA have developed synthetic crystals that trap gasses like a smart sponge. The crystals are highly selective, allowing them to achieve a 400% improvement in CO2 capture over current technologies.
The crystals are three-dimensional and code information in the same manner as DNA. While not as sophisticated as DNA, the developers consider it a significant advancement in chemistry and materials science.
The scientists hope the technology could be used to capture CO2 from both large sources like power plants, and smaller ones like vehicle tailpipes and smaller factories. The material could also potentially be used to convert CO2 into a fuel.
Ideally, these highly efficient crystals could be used for CO2 capture in lots of different settings while we try to transition to cleaner technologies.
via Treehugger
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[Source: Yahoo! Green: TECHNOLOGY - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
