I never thought I'd say that Apple and I have something in common. But after Apple's blush-worthy meeting with investors over its shabby recycling efforts, I related, remembering my own boyfriend shocked to find a wine bottle in my trash can. 

 

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"We recycle!" he declared, holding up the offensive bottle.

 

Apple's shareholders said as much. Apple originally had a dismal recycling program where customers had to cough up $30 to use its take-back programs. It revamped the program to make it free, but it's still well behind Dell and HP, which have had free take-back programs for years. 

 

Apple was caught red-handed by As You Sow , a socially responsible investing group that pounded the company with some hard-hitting questions at its April 27 investor's meeting.

 

Conrad McKerron, a director for As You Sow , calls Apple's new recycling program a move from "laggard" to "more on a par" with its competitors. Steve Jobs tried to win points during the meeting by pointing out that Apple has eliminated use of CRT monitors, which contain heavy metals, and that this has helped the environment more than recycling. 

 

McKerron said to Wired News that Apple is still losing to its competitors because Dell and HP have publicly stated goals for how much waste they're going to take back, and Apple does not.   

 

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Of course, as a wood junkie, I couldn't stop there. If you want your bamboo mouse to feel at home, there is also a wooden mouse pad.  And these folks will even give your laptop or desk top wooden paneling. Hopefully they'll start using bamboo.

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Every day we see dozens of devices, inventions and ideas that are conspiring to make this world a better place. And, usually, their eco aspects are pretty plain to see.

But, while geeks across the world are anticipating solid state drives (usually in the form of flash drives) for the traditional reasons (they are much faster than traditional hard disk drives, and (as they have no moving parts) they are more durable) we EcoGeeks look forward to them for an additional reason.

As any iPod Shuffle owner will note, solid state drives consume far less power than traditional drives. They don't move, they make no noise and they don't need to be cooled. When flash drives replace our hard drives we will work faster, quieter and more efficiently. And that is why, when a new innovation in solid state drives appears, we blog about it here at EcoGeek.

{mosimage}Samsung revealed a laptop with a 32 gig flash drive at CeBIT this year. Booting side by side with a traditional laptop with the spinning platters that we've all got, this thing was up and ready almost twice as fast.

Of course, twice as fast also translates to ten times more expensive. If it were in stores now, this drive would set you back about $900, a cost of $30 per gigabyte. Harddisk drives for laptops are currently closer to $2.50 per gig. So, even with the speed, the durability and the efficiency, Samsung has a ways to go before these drives go mass market.

{mosimage}Falling into the category of “duh” inventions is this little device that pops on the top of a nine volt battery. Suddenly, the candle seems so obsolete! OK, this isn't a complicated post, but you gotta love when we're able to make something that is tiny, cheap, useful and efficient (not only in its use of electricity, but also in the use of materials.)

Pak-Lite says you'll get more than 20 hours on per charge on a nine-volt battery. Of course, if you use this thing on a battery that's not rechargeable, it becomes more a wasteful device than a marvelous toy. So, stock up on nine volt rechargeables and visit 9voltlight.com .

Via EcoFriend

Toronto ordered 150 hybrid buses to incorporate into their mass transit system, according to the Toronto Star . It sounds similar to a project in New York City that has "180 Orion VII's in use now, with orders that will see more than 500 on the road by the end of the year."

 

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Toronto's ordering the same type of bus.

 

A quick quote from Paul Fleuranges, spokesman for New York City Transit: "They are performing as well as or even a little better than we expected, and doing exactly what we wanted, which is to contribute less to pollution and increase fuel mileage."

Hello Redditers. Welcome to EcoGeek.

Just a note...this is a rather old article, and it turns out that VW will in fact be selling this car! You can read more about it here. I guess they were just waiting for $4 / gallon gas...

It isn't really a surprise that this car is extremely fuel efficient. I mean, bobsledders figured out that this design was aerodynamic a long time ago.

But Volkswagon took that extra step and made a bobsled with a diesel engine. It is, in fact, actually a car. It seats two (arguably), gets roughly 235 miles per gallon of diesel fuel and is perched at the very cutting edge aerodynamic technology. Of course, this comcept car has been around since 2002, and we're still no where near seeing it on our roads.

The car's technology comes from it's unique shape and it's ultra-light body. The frame is actually made of magnesium, an extremely light metal, and the outer skin is reinforced with carbon fiber. The one cylinder engine is made of aluminum and sits on top of the rear axle. The car is only a bit more than three feet high and weighs less than 700 lbs.

It might seem like a death trap and, if you got in a head-on with an SUV, it would be. But the car is surprisingly safe for its size, employing an excellent roll-avoidance system that makes the car virtually impossible to flip.

So...the car of the future was officially here four years ago. It could have been (and maybe still could be) a whole new class of vehicle. But nobody wants the passenger to straddle the driver in what looks to be the child of a VW Bug and a bobsled. The technology is in our hands. We choose not to use it.

We've been waiting for this one, imagining the day when we can pick up a product at the grocery store, scan the bar-code, and discover, for real, what the product is about. Sure, we can read the froofy language on the side of the can – quote Eddie Izzard – “This jam was made by groovy people, out of fruit that agreed to be in the jam in the first place.”{mosimage}

But we want to tap into an international database of consumer opinions with a boop of our bar-code scanner. Bill Tomlinson , a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, has made just such a database available. It's called “GreenScanner.”

Quoting Greenscanner: "This site is a public database of opinions about the environmental friendliness of various products. It has been designed for use with network-enabled mobile devices so you can use it at the food store."   Unfortunately it has not been designed to be easy on the eyes.  Be Careful.

Of course, there's no hundred-person-strong team of researchers finding all this information and typing it into the database (yet.) But Tomlinson feels that leaving it in the public's hands is probably a better idea anyway.

So now, standing in the aisle is no longer a passive process. We can discover information and, where there is no data, we can rate the products as we choose. It's cool technology, it's empowering individuals, and it's allowing us to more environmentally informed decisions. This...GreenScanner... is the essence of EcoGeek.

 Via: WorldChanging