Cell phones aren't an easy thing to manufacture. A typical phone has parts that saw a dozen countries before they ever saw eachother.

So when the European Union passed a law saying that all electronic devices had to be free of certain dangerous and toxic materials, the cell phone manufacturers were put in an awkward position.

They couldn't stop selling to the European market, but they also couldn't afford to develop phones specifically for the European market. So cell phone makers are forced to make all of their nearly 2 billion new phones a year comply with the toughest environmental regulations in the world (currently, Europes.) An interesting side-effect of globalization!

 

Now, one year after the Reduction of Hazardous Substances law was passed in England, the entire world has cell phones that are free of cadmium, lead, mercury and bromine. That sure worked out nicely...Thanks Europe!

 

Via World Business Council for Sustainable Development 

 

Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm is trying to get Tesla Motors to build its new manufacturing facility in Michigan rather than in one of the previously announced frontrunner states: Arizona, North Carolina or California.

 

Tesla is already "on the verge of establishing a new engineering center" in the Detroit area, but the governor made a strong pitch for Tesla to build it's electric roadster, as well as a planned forthcoming sedan, in Michigan. "Tesla's U.S. manufacturing plant and the Rochester Hills engineering center would be focused chiefly on the company's next-generation electric vehicle, a sedan that Eberhard hopes will cost around $50,000 and sell about 10 times the volume of the roadster."

EnviroMission, the Australian developer hoping to build a power generating 'solar tower' (previously covered on EcoGeek here and here) is now setting up offices in Arizona for development in the Southwest US.

via: Inside Green Tech

 

Are the batteries for the Volt here already? If GM wants to get new technology into a car within the next five years, the batteries need to be ready today so that they can get into the business of making them cheaper and high-performance in series. 

 

And if the batteries are here today, it is likely that the nanoscale electrode A123 li-ion batteries are them. These things have higher power density, lower weight, won't explode in an accident and opperate from -20 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit.  These batteries are already being used in power tools. Interestingly, hobbyists have already started using those power-tool batteries to create their own electric cars.

 

Signs seem to be pointing to A123's batteries as the source of the power for GM's next generation hybrids and beyond. Not the least of those signs is the announced partnership between A123 and GM. All of this adds up to a pretty positive scenario for the Chevrolet Volt. The only question now is: how long before these things cost less than $10,000 a pack? 

 

Read more at MIT Technology Review and A123 Systems

 

When we're talking about unit of storage per unit of space, there's still no beating traditional harddrives, but solid state memory like flash drives provides something better: more storage per unit of power. As an added benefit, flash memory allows much faster access to data.

 

Thus, EcoGeeks love flash memory, and we can't wait for it to bust through its current limitations. Here we have a fantastic idea. Desgner Vicki Wei has created a concept flash drives that have a male and a female end, providing several sweet abilities. First, they look awesome. Second, there's no reason to trash your old drive when you can just link your old drive to it and have both operate together. Third, you can expand the drive until it's the size that you need to run your OS and all vital programs, but no further.

 

Now, there are some problems here. Flash memory is unfortunately quite rigid, so the bendy portions won't actually be able to contain memory. Also, I'm not sure if flash drives are actually designed to be used in series. I'm not sure about this, but if thumb drives can't actually be used in series than this idea is definitely DOA. 

 

Via Yanko Design 

 

The Bubba Server, pictured here (topless) is a compact, efficient and inepensive little server that can solve a lot of the every day ftp. http, or torrent serving issues that an EcoGeek might face in any given day.

 

It won't be much good for really advanced serving, with only 64 mb of ram and 200 mhz processor, but just for serving files this could easily take care of business. They available in Europe now for between 250 and 450 Euros with between 80 and 500 gigs of harddrive.

 

Best of all, this little guy won't ever pull more than 10 watts from the wall...that's 500 gigs of storage using less juice than a compact fluorescent light bulb! 

 

More specs at LinuxDevices 

 

 

Uhhhh...Dell, aren't you a multinational corporation with a large and high-powered marketing department? If you're going to do something environmentally fantastic, will you please give it a less inane name? Honestly, it sounds like an episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers.

 

Plant a Tree for Me is a new campaign from Dell that allows customers to offest the carbon impact of their computing upon purchasing their new device. For a laptop, $2 covers the carbon for the life of the computer while desktop customers will be asked to volunteer $6. 

 

The system has absolutely no drawbacks for Dell, as customers aren't required to pay, and Dell has basically handed off responsibility for the devices carbon footprint to the consumer.

 

Nonetheless, the new Dell.com/earth website is an absolutely wonderful resource, and the Plant a Tree for Me campaign is genuinely a fine idea. I've heard some better ideas in my time, but I can see this not only increasing the number of trees in the world, and helping to support some good organizations, but the campaign will also increase awareness of their impact on the environment, and there's nothin' wrong with that.

 

Dell continues to be a leader in environmental technologies, and while this is significantly less interesting, in my opinion, than their global recycling efforts, it's good to see them continually making steps to differentiate them from the rest of the pack. 

 

Here's a bit more news from the show in Detroit. I just got up close and personal with the first non-gasoline hybrid concept. The Ford Airstream is a van, kinda, that has some pretty unique features.

The idea is very similar to the Volt, making the technology seem even more inevitable. But, while the Volt is being designed to utilize gasoline, bio fuels, or hydrogen, the Airstream would use only hydrogen fuel cells to recharge it's onboard batteries.

The vehicle is a plugin electric, just like the Volt would be, but the car is significantly more futuristic, and also much larger, and a more limited pure-EV range than the Volt.

The Volt is superior to the Airstream in one very specific way, all of the infrastructure necessary for the Volt is currently in place. And while the Volt could work as a fuel cell vehicle in the limited areas were hydrogen infrastructure exists, the Airstream could not operate anywhere but in those places.

Also, it's quite obvious that GM is more serious about it's E-Flex system, and has developed it much more significantly, than Ford has.

 

 

It's hard to get a substantial amount of juice from a case-mounted solar panel. Sewing a photovoltaic panel into your jean jacket will only get you so far. And while portable devices do generally use very little power, no portable solar panel has yet been able to charge a laptop computer.

But that's about to change. Eclipse Solar Gear has created a hard laptop case that can actually charge a laptop! That is, if you've got full sun and a relatively small laptop computer.

The laptop case, which eclipse is readying for the consumer market, can also charge any smaller electronic gadgets. And, on top of being the first of its kind, it's also a pretty good looking product.

 

Via TreeHugger 

After having had the chance to talk with executives, engineers and designers at GM, I feel like I understand where the Volt came from, why we didn't see it sooner, and where the concept might soon be headed.

Bob Lutz pointed out that this is not really a new idea. Concept electric cars who's batteries were charged by an onboard generator existed as early as 1968. What has changed is battery technology.

In a short interview with Bob Lutz, he told me, and a group of other bloggers, that he honestly never believed battery technology would take off the way it did. He says, and I can't say whether or not he's being entirely truthful, that GM thought, after the EV1, that all-electric cars could never work. So, instead of investing heavily in battery technology, they invested in fuel cell technology.

 

More after the Jump 

 

Have I been hinting enough? Have I been saying that GM is going to do something that, while not healing the hurt they’ve dealt out over the last few decades, will at least get their foot in the door of the gasoline rehab clinic?

Well here it is, and it’s beautiful.

The Chevrolet Volt is a hybrid hatchback that can get anywhere from a sixty to a million miles per gallon.

OK, so you all trusted me until I said that, and now you’re checking to see if it’s April already. But I’m for real.

The Volt contains two engines, like any hybrid car, a gasoline engine and an electric engine. However, the gasoline engine never actually propels the car.

 

All propulsion is accomplished by the electric engine which, in turn, is powered by the lithium ion batteries. The batteries are charged by plugging them into the wall. For the first forty or so miles of driving, the batteries have enough power to move the car from zero to sixty in 8 seconds and hit a top speed of 120 mph.

Then, after all that aerodynamic, electric, regenerative-brake-using driving, an ultra-efficient, small, inexpensive gasoline engine kicks on and recharges the battery. Using only power generated by the gas generator, the car gets about 60 mpg.

But if trips are less than 40 miles (which most daily commutes are) the car doesn’t use a drop of gasoline. So the majority of trips will use absolutely no gasoline at all. Technically, if you drive 40 miles a day, for 68 years, and then drove a bit more than 40 miles one day…you would get One Million Miles Per Gallon. Of course, the batteries would die long before that, and the gasoline in your tank would likely have evaporated away or, more likely, have been siphoned off by Mad Max and his post apocalyptic marauders.

Theoretically, the 40 miles number will grow along with battery technology.  GM’s engineers have also made the innovative power train (which they’re calling the E-Flex System) modular. So, instead of a gas generator, a diesel, ethanol, hydrogen, or hydrogen fuel cell generator could be used.

All-in-all, this is a fikkin fabulous idea that will likely be showing up in consumer vehicles of all shapes and sizes in the next five years. This will almost certainly be the first new car I will ever buy, and I will be proud to own it.