Category Archives: Awareness and Hype
Very soon, Starwood Hotels and Resorts will stop tossing out all the used soaps and bottles from guestrooms, instead having them recycled and distributed worldwide in an attempt to spread global hygiene, as part of the Clean the World initiative. The hospitality firm will recycle the soap and bottles from as many as 500 Starwood hotels in North America, recycling an estimated 1.6 million pounds of hotel soap annually. This will then be distributed across the world to keep away hygiene-related diseases in countries like Haiti, Japan, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, Honduras, Mexico and Albania.
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Data centers are known energy hogs. These plug into the grid and suck in a load of energy, to keep the internet up and running. Lately however, we’ve seen a rise in green-energy powered data centers that power up using renewable energy sources instead of simply plugging into the grid. And powering a data center with solar energy or wind energy isn’t a piece of cake either! It takes a load of solar panels to soak in the sun to keep these energy-hungry monsters alive. Take the DataScan Technologies data center for example. This one uses the second-largest solar array in Georgia that generates about 285,500 kWh hours of electricity annually. Plugging into solar energy has helped this data center save carbon emissions by 205 metric tons!
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We’ve seen the City of New York indulge in a number of green initiatives before including the wind turbines planned for the city and the Urban Technology Innovation Center, making it one of the greenest cities in the United States of America. City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced the PlaNYC, a sustainability plan that aims to curb the use of dirty heating fuels and use capped landfills for solar power plants. Partnerships with solar developers will be sealed for the solar panels to be set up at landfills with properties measuring up to 3000 acres! The Clean Heat initiative on the other hand will use financial incentives and a public education campaign to stop the use of polluting heating oils, instead switching to natural gas and low-sulfur oils. With this, the Big Apple goes greener, and not necessarily rawer!
[Cnet]
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Microsoft has decided to give itself a greener edge and will soon begin using post-consumer recycled paper for its operations. In alliance with locally owned and operated Grays Harbor Paper of Hoquiam, Washington, the Windows makers will henceforth use 100% recycled paper, replacing the current printing stock made with 30% recycled paper. The initiative by the company will help save up approximately 2,500 million BTUs in net energy, the equivalent of 750 million pounds of carbon dioxide. This will also help keep about 8,000 trees alive on an annual basis!
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The recently opened Mint Hotel located near the Tower of London is already stealing the limelight from the good old landmark, with its eye-catching façade, the tallest living green wall in the whole of Europe! Unveiled last month, this vertical garden covers 1,025 square meters of the building. And the visual-treat isn’t limited to observers from the outside. Owing to the hotel’s large floor-to-ceiling windows, the beautiful greenery can also be viewed from the hotel’s lobby. The wall boasts forty different species of plants. In all, the wall has growing 184,000 single plants divided between 4,100 planting modules. To feed this, an automatic-irrigation system is used which also disperses liquid fertilizers to keep the plants healthy.
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The US Postal Service is doing its bit to help spread green awareness amongst citizens, with the help of green postage stamps that carry environment-friendly and inspiring messages. As part of the Go Green initiative, these stamps, 16 of them in all belonging to the Forever series include messages such as “Plant Trees”, “Adjust the Thermostat”, “Use Public Transportation” and a lot more, giving you subtle but effective reminders every time you decide to write and post a letter. Given that the snail-mail service is slowly losing its edge, due to the ever-increasing use of the internet, mailing portals like Yahoo.com and Gmail.com could also probably help spread the green with similar messages appearing on a user’s screen, while composing an email!
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The Brazilian’s sure know how to land their choppers in an eco-friendly way in some otherwise- inaccessible locations. Very recently, the first solar-helipad kit was unveiled at the Latin American Aero and Defense International Exhibition and Conference on Aerospace and Defense Technology. Using solar energy to power up, this stand-alone wireless helipad light and navigational aid is the first of its kind in the world and was produced jointly by Carmanah Technologies and ADB Airfield Solutions. Packed with ADB wireless solar engine power systems, visual navigation aids and Carmanah wireless solar-powered airfield lighting technology, the system will help defense forces in Latin America access remote and isolated locations, fighting illegal immigration, drug trafficking and other organized crime activities.
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Prospective car buyers in Quebec have a reason to rejoice now, if they’ve been dreaming of an electric car that is. The province of Quebec is now offering a rebate of up to CA$8,000 for electric car and plug-in hybrid purchasers! The sum depends on the type of vehicle you opt to buy, its range and efficiency. Electric cars powered with nothing else but electricity, are favoured upon a lot more than hybrids are with the rebate value. With this initiative, the province hopes to have as many as 300,000 electric vehicles and hybrids on streets by 2020, 25% of Quebec’s vehicle population.
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It just seems wrong growing up in a city with nothing but skyscrapers. And kids in cities like NYC do have a hard time scooping out places for some outdoor fun! Designer Andrew Burdick decided to give the kids hailing from the Big Apple a better play time experience by simply extending the hours during which existing fields can be used, instead of constructing new ones, a cheaper and time saving strategy. Using solar power and wind energy, Burdick proposes to set up LED lighting that will help illuminate these play areas during dark hours too, enabling them to be used 24 hours a day. Now we aren’t really sure about just how many kids would prefer playing a soccer game at night, but the proposal seems economically practical!
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Cities today have turned into concrete jungles. The amount of green and open land is slowly diminishing in our urban areas. It’s no wonder that cities around the globe keep flooding over and over again. Once the waters flow out into the streets, it proves to be extremely hazardous, giving rise to diseases and mixing up with toxic waste from drainage systems. So, designer Liu Yun came up with this innovative technique to purify this water to some extent. Termed the Health Light, the solar powered device gets rid of the contaminating bacteria in water and detoxifies it, filtering it in the process.
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