Archive for the ‘Green’ Category

Straw Sneakers

In this project, designer HoDong Sung took on the task of redesigning a two thousand year old shoe. A shoe design, I should say, not a old rotten shoe. The Bio Mituri is the 2009 re-design of the traditional Mituri straw shoe from Korea. Reducing pollution and increasing style points at the same time! Enjoy this and Sung’s fantastic industrial design travels and shoe-history in real sneaker comfort!

First let me tell you a tiny bit about HoDong Sung. Born and raised in “polution-city” North Korea. What I mean is Sung has vivid memories of the low eco standards in the country, more specifically in their high-quality athletic footwear factories in the 1980s. From there Sung spent time developing industrial design skills in super-eco-clean Australia. Then Sung was a footwear designer for Nike in Oregon, USA. Then on to Adidas in Herzogenaurach, Germany.

This path, along with the changing and ever-greening times, Sung began designing an eco-friendly no-performance-sacrificed set of shoes. For the Bio Mituri the “main idea is combining Korean traditional Mituri upper design with western developed sole structure, which is the perfect marriage of natural material with ergonomics.”

A. Mituri twisted straw replaced with bamboo yarn for durability, eco-friendliness. (Anti-bacterial, non-allergenic)

B. Mituri adjustability improved upon with new upper structure with a string system that wraps top, bottom, heel together all at once.

C. Mituri weak points done away with using biodegradable foam midsole. This sole biodegrades 50 times faster than the average shoe.

D. Production reduction (combining toe cap, heel counter, insole, and midsole in to one injection-molded midsole) minimizes CO2 emissions. Also has recycled tire outsole.

E. Glue used to connect outsole and midsole is water-based cement, avoiding chemical bonds that pollute.

Designer: HoDong SUNG

The Only Gadget Recycling List You Need [Recycling]

Engadget’s put together a comprehensive list for finding where to recycle pretty much gadget you could possibly own. If you’re not rolling last year’s model style as we approach the season of buying new crap, take a look. Recycle! [Engadget]

US government lays out cash for wall-based, in-home ’smart meters’

Google has its PowerMeter, Microsoft has its Hohm and Obama has his “smart meters.” Got it? Good. Around two years after UK taxpayers began footing the bill for in-home energy monitors, it seems as if America’s current administration is looking to follow suit. While visiting the now-open solar facility in Arcadia, Florida today, the Pres announced that $3.4 billion in cash that the US doesn’t actually have has just been set aside for a number of things, namely an intelligent power grid and a whole bundle of smart power meters. Aside from boring apparatuses like new digital transformers and grid sensors (both of which are designed to modernize the nation’s “dilapidated” electric network), 18 million smart meters and 1 million “other in-home devices” will be installed in select abodes. The idea here is to give individuals a better way to monitor their electricity usage, with the eventual goal set at 40 million installed meters over the next few years. Great idea, guys — or you know, you could just advise people to turn stuff off when they aren’t using it, or not use energy they can’t afford. Just sayin’.

Filed under: Household

US government lays out cash for wall-based, in-home ’smart meters’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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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Story Of The 90 Degree Charge

Plug on your gadget and hit the switch on…gadget recharges but you switch it off at your convenience; Waste of electricity. Let’s change this scene a bit, plug into the 90 Degree Charger, and rotate the plug manually to complete the electric circuit, like you do with a timer. When the gadget gets tanked up, the plug-point rotates back to the normal position, breaking off the circuit, thus saving on electricity. All eco-freaks are Happy! And So am I!

Designers :Jie Zhang & He-Peng Wei

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