Posts Tagged ‘green technology’

Kermit the Frog Sang “It’s Not Easy Being Green”? Now we are Discovering That He Was Prophetic

Monday, September 12th, 2011


Hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius offer better kilometres to the litre of fuel without having to sacrifice size or comfort, while electric automobiles undertake to transport us without the need for crude oil.

Each enterprise is attempting to get the best environmentally friendly certification for their products, whether green cleaning companies or computer manufacturers. Windmills are now not the traditional Dutch paintings you see hanging on art gallery walls; they’re turning up on farms, mountain ridges, even in the sea. Various government departments seem to launch a new energy initiative every other week, with the promise of more green roles to offset any transient agony to your wallet.

But while these green possible choices may now appear ever-present, they are not basically as common as we think. Take electricity: a minute quantity of our electricity came from renewable sources and almost all of that's hydroelectric power, not wind or solar. Nuclear power generation was beginning to look like a choice, it is not very likely to get up in the wake of Japan’s nuclear disaster.

Green technology, particularly in automobiles, will get a big boost from higher oil costs. That's the good news. The bad news is that those higher prices result from higher demand in China and the 3rd world. Since Nov 2009, China has become the biggest auto market in the world. China’s car industry has been in fast development since the early 1990s. In 2009, China produced 13.79 million autos, of which 8 million were passenger autos and 3.41 million were commercial vehicles. Almost all of the cars manufactured in China are sold inside China, with only 369,600 cars being exported in 2009. This rising demand for vehicles will have a massive effect on oil prices globally.

While we consume less oil, we might not be slowing the rate of fossil-fuel consumption; we may simply be transferring that consumption someplace else. Unless we somehow stop burning traditional fuels, all the carbon now under the Earth’s surface will end up in the atmosphere in the following couple of hundred years. As the physicist Robert B. Laughlin lately pointed out in The American Scholar, from the Earth’s viewpoint, about a hundred years is less than the blinking of an eye. But sadly that's not right for human lives which should be changed greatly.

Unfortunately, though we have better technologies that enable us to use less fossil fuel, yet we now don’t have any scalable way to use no carbon, or anything close to none. Even rapidly maturing technologies like wind power need carbon intensive backup generation capacity for those occasions when the wind does not blow. Nobody has yet designed a hybrid commercial plane. Being green, we are finding out, is going to be harder than it sounds.

dLook online advertising directory feature many green technology businesses, from solar energy to eco friendly cleaners.

How Can You Use Technology To Be Friendlier To The Environment?

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

When you consider the latest high technology gadgets what goes through your head? It will differ from one individual to another. Some might think that they’re cool. Others might think that they’re expensive. Some almost certainly feel that they’re confusing and can be difficult to operate. It very much depends on your own individual viewpoint. However, it’s probably a fair bet to say that you almost certainly don’t associate the latest geeky electronic gizmo with doing your bit for the environment – even so, electronic devices can, used properly, be environmentally friendly.

Digital photo frames for example have become very popular over the last two or three years. As a result of fierce competition, prices have reduced considerably and you can now pick up perfectly serviceable digital frames for more or less the same price that you might expect to pay for a traditional photo frame. Digital frames have a number of perceived advantages, one of which is their ability to display hundreds of different photographs using a single frame.

Much will depend upon just how many photographs you usually print out in a typical year, but if you are in the habit of taking a lot of snaps, then the use of a digital frame to display your photo collection could have a positive environmental impact. Whether you avoid having photos printed out at a processing lab or if you just print out less on your computer printer you will wind up using fewer materials.

Another good, and very topical, example is the current trendy gadget – the e-book reader. E-book readers have actually been available for quite some time, but they really caught the public’s imagination in 2009 and now seem poised to increase sales even further in 2010. The Kindle reader is currently the most popular by a long way and Sony have also established a good market presence.

Every year, the American book, magazine and newspaper industry consumes 125 million trees to provide the paper required. Huge amounts of water, energy and a whole host of chemicals are also consumed to feed the nation’s reading habit. What’s more, books being a physical product require to be delivered from the publisher’s warehouse to the book store – typically using road transportation. The gas used by customers who drive to and from the retail outlet is also a factor in determining the carbon footprint of a typical book.

Of course, e-books do not consume large quantities of paper, ink etc. in their production. Also, as they are not a physical product, they can be delivered over the internet rather than using the road transport network.

Of course, as both e-book readers and digital photo frames are themselves physical products, they do require both materials and energy for their production. They also require delivery to the point of sale or direct to the final customer. Even so, according to studies have shown that, even when the materials consumed are offset against the savings in paper, energy, ink etc. that such devices can be better for the environment (though it will depend, to a certain extent, on how many books you read or how many photos you process each year).