Green Technology

Unlike some previous footage, fleeting and grainy, here we're lucky enough to see a Javan leopard getting all cozy in front of the camera.

Google, already an investor in the clean energy startup, apparently decided that if owning part of it was good, owning all of it would be even better!

The recent Bangladesh factory collaspe sparks qustions about cheap clothes.

The American term sneakers refers to footwear with a flexible sole made of rubber or synthetic material and an upper part made of leather or canvas. Sneakers were originally sporting apparel, but today are worn much more widely as casual footwear. A typical pair of running shoes generates 30 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to keeping a 100-watt light bulb on for one week, according to a new MIT-led life cycle assessment. A life cycle measures the environmental impact of the raw materials, processing, and transport to the final market as well as waste disposal. But what’s surprising to researchers isn’t the size of a shoe’s carbon footprint, but where the majority of that footprint comes from. The researchers found that more than two-thirds of a running shoe’s carbon impact can come from the manufacturing processes, with a smaller percentage arising from acquiring or extracting raw materials. This breakdown is expected for more complex products such as electronics, where the energy that goes into manufacturing fine, integrated circuits can outweigh the energy expended in processing raw materials. But for less technically advanced products — particularly those that don’t require electronic components — the opposite is often the case. So why does a pair of sneakers, which may seem like a relatively simple product, emit so much more carbon dioxide in its manufacturing phase? A team led by Randolph Kirchain, principal research scientist in MIT’s Materials Systems Laboratory broke down the various steps involved in both materials extraction and manufacturing. The group found that much of the carbon impact came from powering manufacturing plants. A significant portion of the world’s shoe manufacturers are located in China, where coal is the dominant source of electricity. Coal is also typically used to generate steam or run other processes in the plant itself. A typical pair of running shoes comprises 65 discrete parts requiring more than 360 processing steps to assemble, from sewing and cutting to injection molding, foaming and heating. These processes are energy-intensive — and therefore, carbon-intensive — compared with the energy that goes into making shoe materials, such as polyester and polyurethane. “Understanding environmental footprint is resource intensive. The key is, you need to put your analytical effort into the areas that matter,” Kirchain says. “In general, we found that if you have a product that has a relatively high number of parts and process steps, and that is relatively light [weight], then you want to make sure you don’t overlook manufacturing.” Kirchain and his colleagues have published their results in the Journal of Cleaner Production. In 2010, nearly 25 billion shoes were purchased around the world, the majority of them manufactured in China and other developing countries. As Kirchain and his co-authors write in their paper, In response to environmental concern, companies have started to take account of their products’ greenhouse-gas contributions, in part by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide associated with every process throughout a product’s life cycle. Life-cycle assessment is a technique to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product’s life from-cradle-to-grave (i.e., from raw material extraction through materials processing, manufacture, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal or recycling). These can help avoid a narrow outlook on environmental concerns by compiling an inventory of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental releases, evaluating the potential impacts, and Interpreting the results to help make a more informed decision. Cradle-to-grave approach means breaking down every possible greenhouse gas-emitting step: from the point at which the shoes’ raw materials are extracted to the shoes’ demise, whether burned, landfilled or recycled. The researchers divided the shoes’ lifecycle into f

It's about time that we stopped wasting drinking water to flush away our waste; Allison Bailes did it and isn't complaining.

Bottom line, if you live in a state that has good incentives and you take a short lease, it's possible that you could be paying almost nothing net, or even get paid, to drive an electric car.

The Chevrolet Spark EV, the first 100% electric vehicle by GM since the EV1, is getting close to its launch date.

Denmark is held up as one of the great success stories when it comes to wind power – and it is. Half of Denmark’s electricity consumption will be generated by wind power in just seven years time. But Denmark has other lessons for those interested in wind power. It illustrates how effective – or ineffective – government support for renewable energy can be. At one stage, wind power in Denmark was a genuinely popular movement. Around 3,000 community organizations with 150,000 shareholders operated wind turbines there. Then the government changed the law. They got rid of feed-in tariffs and replaced them with renewable portfolio standards (mandates requiring utilities to purchase renewable energy) and top-ups when renewable electricity was sold on the market. The result: the market stalled, people started decommissioning their wind turbines in large numbers. People like feed-in tariffs and they will invest in renewables if they are there. Here’s an infographic that illustrates the story. Related posts:Japan Feed-in Tariffs Approved as Government Restarts 2 Nuclear PlantsFrench Solar PV Capacity Hits 3,000 MWFrance Cuts Solar PV Feed In Tariffs by 12 PercentDenmark Wants to Become Alternative Energy PowerhouseFrance Issues New Regulations for Large Solar PV InstallationsCopyright © 2008-2010 CleanTechies, Inc. and Partners This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Written by 2GreenEnergy. To the comments (Digital Fingerprint: b008bf120fbd682ffd7ee5812c495c9a)Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

This super-light, fixed-gear bike can be customized for an individual rider in a very small period of time.

Spring showers and abundant sunshine bring beautiful green grass ... and that grass is going to have to be mowed. Small yards are ideal for old fashioned reel mowers, which rely on blades powered by your own energy. Reel mowers are smaller than bulky gas and electric mowers and you can pretend it's the 1950's while you push one around. More