You’ll come across quite a lot of stuff to make your eyebrows disappear into your hairline at the London Festival of Architecture. One of these awesome creations is a eco-friendly elevator, developed by Matthew Lloyd. This innovative contraption uses water and solar power to lift wheelchair users up the stairs of the Duke of York, near the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Weighing three tons, this structure is made of Perspex and steel. To power up, two solar panels atop the contraption juice the sun, while water weights are used to counterbalance the elevator car.

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Home energy management systems are more than just eye-candy for your home that you set up to make your starry eyed neighbor go all green with envy. Speaking about green, these systems sure help keep electricity bills short and brief, and help us stay informed with just how much energy we use, decreasing carbon footprints and strain on electricity grids. Cisco recently came up with an Android tablet this week that works as a table top home energy management system. Using a 7-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive touch screen, this one’s powered by Ubuntu Linux for MID on a 1.1GHz Intel Atom chip. With an 802.11n WiFi or gigabit Ethernet using protocols, you can hook this one up with smart thermostats and appliances.

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You’ve probably come across a tuk-tuk or a rickshaw on a visit to East Asian countries. A while ago, we stumbled upon solar powered rickshaws in India and a wind-powered one in Nepal. Well, Bangkok’s three wheeled contraptions get their share of renewable energy use. Tuk-tuks get their name from the noise made by the earlier models, and that’s exactly what the people of Bangkok love calling their 8,000 rickshaws. Colored brightly, these eye-catching modes of transport drink a lot though, gulping down those precious gallons of gasoline and natural gas. Now these rickshaws do look somewhat rustic, but give them a bit of solar powered glory, and they’ll go all 21st century like. Air Marshal Morakot Charnsomruad came up with his own solar powered version of the tuk-tuk which has grabbed a lot of attention.

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We’ve seen quite a few eco-friendly and environment friendly stadiums like the Thyagaraj Stadium in New Delhi and the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban before. Here’s yet another one that takes the whole idea of involving green in sports to a whole new level. This soccer stadium in Vancouver, known as the Empire Field Stadium, has its field made partly of recycled tires, 22,450 of them in all. This soccer stadium uses 346,000 pounds of crumb rubber made from tires. This is the largest installation of crumb rubber in all of British Columbia, which has given 22,450 scrap tires a new life of sports. The rubber is used as an additive to the soil with an improved drainage and provides a level of cushioning to keep away nasty on-field injuries.

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Just recently, Paris was in the news for its plans to install underwater turbines at the Seine River to generate hydroelectric energy. Well, the city has yet another green plan under the hammer, currently being constructed that could turn the transport system in Paris a whole lot cleaner and eco-friendly. Now we’ve come across quite a few bike sharing programs in cities like Montreal and Washington before. Paris are pushing further, and is hoping to soon set up an electric car sharing program. This could be the world’s largest car sharing program ever, with over 3,000 electric vehicles and over 1,000 park-n-go lots scattered throughout the city.

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We all use elevators, to keep our tired legs from climbing up the stairs today. Well, these elevators do consume a whole load of power and require a few overhauls to make them greener. That’s exactly what Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has been working on and has recently come up with energy-saving parts for elevators. At a factory in Thailand, the company is busy producing energy-efficient hoists, basic elevator parts used to raise and lower elevators suspended by ropes. These new hoists, known as gearless hoists, are a lot more expensive than the older elevator parts, but use 20% lesser power.

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If you live in London and think the air around you to be sparkling clean, hit yourself on your head. You are completely delusional! The city is one of the most polluted in Europe. For the 36th time this year, pollution monitoring equipment in the city displayed some pretty shocking and dangerously high levels. No more than 35 such days are allowed in Britain, and London has crossed that mark by one more polluted day. This breach of EU levels has left the government pink with embarrassment. Just three weeks ago, a final warning was sent to improve the quality of air, and now this.

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Morocco's King Mohammed VI cut the red ribbon and pulled the veil of a new 250-million-euro (300 million dollar) wind farm, the biggest in Africa, near Tangiers on Monday. The wind farm is located in Melloussa, 34 kilometers (21 miles) from Tangiers, northern Morocco, and houses 165 turbines. Together, these turbines harvest enough power from the wind to generate 140 megawatts of electricity. Partly financed by the European Bank with 80 million euros, the project received funds from Spanish and German banks, amounting to 150 million euros.

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Electric cars are taking the automobile market by a storm, turning our roads and streets into greener places to drive, without that terribly ugly and dark carbon footprint. We’ve seen quite a few electric car concepts like the Nissan Leaf and the Like by the Mitsuoka Motor Co. before. None of these however seem remotely similar to this new electric car. At first, this little vehicle reminded us of a merry little Easter egg on wheels. A closer look however, reveals a highly efficient electric car, which seats one person, sells cheap and has a great range too!

So there goes your “disposable” pen, all useless and worthless, with its ink drain. As usual, you tip it into your waste bin and buy a new one. Well, you probably haven’t realized the amount of energy put into the manufacturing of that writing device, and the tremendous harm a few thousand of these in the waste could do to the environment. A few people do think about matters like these in our day to day life, and some of them come up with alternatives like this biodegradable pen. A US firm, DBA has designed a environment friendly pen, the DBA 98 Pen, that is 98% biodegradable and uses comparatively lesser energy during manufacturing.

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The next time you visit Paris, besides looking at the skyline for the Eiffel Tower, make sure you dip your head below the water too, to witness the city’s new green marvel, the underwater turbines at River Seine. Running through Paris, this river is known as the “sacred river”, and will now do its share in producing some green energy. Eight turbines will be hooked on below the city bridges, which will help generate the required energy. These turbines or hydroliennes, will have their major bulk hidden underwater, harnessing energy from the flowing sacred river. The modern hydro-mill part of the equipment shows its head above the water surface.

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You might have come across Electrolux’s recent venture to help clear out plastic islands and debris in the oceans, recycling them into vacuum cleaners. Well, an architecture firm is dreaming up a “Recycled Island” in the Pacific Ocean, with remarkable sustainability and eco-friendly environment hugging features. This could help clean up the oceans and play home to climate refugees too. WHIM architecture, the firm who designed this concept, think that islands like these could help better the environment, putting to use all that toxic waste which has been throttling marine life to a miserable death all along.

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Here’s a solar cell that could easily fit into the mouth of a bug, the thinnest solar cell the world has ever seen before. This extremely thin-film solar cell, by Transform Solar could seen be produced in Boise, if all goes well. Boise, Idaho is already making way for a 10-megawatt photovoltaic plant, and may soon welcome this production plant too. The cells known as “Silver” are thinner than ever, and highly efficient. The company, Transform Solar, is a joint venture between Boise-based Micron Technology and Australia’s Origin Energy. New life will be given to an old computer chip plant which will be overhauled to produce these solar cells.

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Shutterbugs love snapping away at every little unusual and fascinating thing they see. And to keep their photo blogs updated the cameras they use need to remain all juiced up and ready, to fish out quickly and snap away. Well, most of us use a strap to keep that lovely and expensive camera hanging around our necks, just incase we need to click a few moments all of a sudden. After all, photography is about capturing the right frame at the right time. Here’s a strap with a twist to it. It charges up your camera too! Using solar panels embedded in it, the Solar Camera Strap designed by Weng Jie soaks in the sun’s energy outdoors, and keeps you clicking away.

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You’d probably hit yourself on the head, and remember the movie Avatar with this one. Remember the weirdly colored trees in Pandora? Well, London will have a few too, this time in pink instead of the good old greenery. To sprout up at London’s Belgrave Square this weekend, the OR2 is a shading device and solar-powered chandelier. Designed by Orproject, a London based firm, this pink tree generously lends its shade during the day time and glows at night, just like those purple-blue trees in Pandora.

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