Archive for the ‘eco’ Category

Turn A Window Into a Garden

The Windowfarms project turns your window into an urban farm, using inexpensive and recyclable parts. The results are a “curtain” for any window that is also a year-round, high-yield, vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, edible garden. The open designs are free to download and easy to implement. The project also encourages the community to innovate and share improvements.

Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray started this project in February, 2009 during their artist’s residency in New York’s Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. Their mission is to encourage sustainable solutions that can be implemented today by anyone. Recently, Riley presented developments of Windowfarms at the New York chapter of http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotnyc/04.nov.2009/Dorkbot.

Green tech: At the beauty salon, be the girl with green hair

You can be the eco-conscious girl with green hair if you patronize beauty salons that use green hair-care products.

Hair dyes, shampoos, and other such products have traditionally contained synthetic chemicals that can harm the user and the environment. But an increasing number of hair care salons are saying “no” to that tradition. They’re stocking environment-friendly products and using them on their customers.

It’s a trend that first took hold–of course–in California. But the trend is spreading to other parts of the US. An article in Scientific American advises you to just Google “green hair salons” plus your state abbreviation and you may be surprised to find one–or more–near you.

And if you can’t find a local green hair salon, you can nag your favorite salon into turning green. Urge your hairdressers to use the increasing number of hair-care options that are safer for their clients and the world. Some brand names to look for: EcoColors, Aveda, Modern Organic Products or Innersense

Green tech: How to cut the cost of solar equipment

Solar power. Solar heating. Solar lighting. Sure, you’d like to fuel your life for free with help from the everlasting sun. Trouble is, it’s not really free.

The equipment that can turn sunshine into a warm, well-lit life costs the earth. You can easily spend $20,000 or more for rooftop solar panels, for example.

But there’s hope. Alternative financing of solar has begun in the US, in a small way. For example, a few thousand homeowners is California, Arizona, and Oregon are reducing their upfront costs by leasing solar equipment–and paying an estimated 15% less for electricity, equipment included. And the federal government has an assortment of programs that underwrite homeowners’ solar projects.

Read all about these and other possibilities for reducing the cost of solar equipment at E, the environmental magazine.

How-to: recycle your old gadgets

We see a lot of gadgets come in the door here at Engadget. In fact, getting them in the door is actually the easy part… it’s getting them back out that’s a bit confusing. Recycling — something that most of us do on a day-to-day basis with our trash — is a bit stickier when it comes to gadgets. In recent years, however, most major consumer electronics companies have stepped up their games a bit and begun “take back” recycling programs of their own. There are a lot of resources out there if you want to rid yourself of old gadgets in a responsible way, but it can be a pretty overwhelming prospect, especially if (like us) you have an actual pile of old cellphones which has been growing since 1998. We thought about that a lot, and decided to try to make sense of all the wild masses of information out there on the internet, and to provide our readers a central location to look for all that information. Read on and see what we’ve come up with!

Continue reading How-to: recycle your old gadgets

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How-to: recycle your old gadgets originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Terracycle makes eco-friendly speakers from orphaned snack bags

Someone apparently doesn’t believe in the word “waste”. And you bet they are bound to have a few creative genes when they can defy such a powerful word. Well, apparently such creative genes must total much more than one can imagine, for these geniuses from TerraCycle have created the most unique products in their effort to turn waste into something useful.

The company, founded by Tom Szaky, collects waste from groups across the country and turns it into over 100 useful products, in addition to donating money to charities for each “waste” item that it receives. Consider the Frito-Lay Speakers, for example. These funky speakers are made from discarded chip bags. And they are functional. They are foldable speakers that don’t require batteries and plug into your mp3 or other portable audio player with a 3.5 mm universal plug. TerraCycle sells them online at $19.99.

So the next time you toss out that used chip bag, think new and send it to over to these sensible folks at TerraCycle – you would have earned $.02 for a non-profit organization or school of your choice, plus the right to brag that you helped create the world’s cleanest speakers.

Via Crave.

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