carbon footprint
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Europe's aviation safety agency is planning an eco ranking for flights
The EU's Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) plans to create eco-ranking labels labels for the airline industry.
Adidas and Allbirds team up to make environmentally friendly shoes
Adidas and Allbirds hope to create a high performance sneaker with the lowest carbon footprint to date.
Wrist sensor logs the devices you use and your power consumption
MagnifiSense is a high-tech wristband developed by University of Washington researchers. Unlike fitness trackers, though, it doesn't log the number of steps you've taken or calories burned: it takes note of the electronics and appliances you personally use to keep track of your power consumption. During their tests, the researchers found that the sensor can correctly identify and differentiate 12 devices from each other, including electric toothbrushes, lamps, laptops and even cars. It's able to tell them apart by "listening" to the electronic radiation they generate. According to lead researcher Edward Wang, electronics actually produce distinct sounds similar to "vocal cord patterns," so "a blender 'sings' quite differently than a hair dryer."
Save a few bucks by turning your Mac off or letting it sleep
When it comes to saving energy, I think I do pretty well. My wife and I both drive high-MPG vehicles, we keep our thermostat at a relatively chilly 62°F during the daytime hours in winter, and we don't have air conditioning in our home. We shut off lights when they're not needed, and all of our appliances are Energy Star certified. But one thing I usually don't do is shut my late 2012 27-inch iMac off at night or let it go into sleep mode. While doing a self-audit of energy usage in preparation for a possible installation of photovoltaic solar panels at our house, I thought it would be useful to determine whether or not turning my big-screen iMac off when I'm not using it would save a lot of energy and money. The short answer? It doesn't save enough to make it worthwhile, although if you're out to save the world, turning your Mac off or letting it drift off into sleep mode can ease your conscience. To give you an idea of my current weekday usage, I work about 8 hours per day with the iMac display blasting away, and the other 16 hours of the day the iMac is usually in "idle mode" with the display off. That's not sleep mode -- basically I just have my display set to shut off after 15 minutes of non-use, and the device never sleeps. Why? Well, I have processes that go off at odd times of the night, and I sometimes like to use Parallels Access to control my iMac from my iPad. On weekends, I try to stay away from the iMac as much as possible, so I'd say I average about 2 hours of use per day with 22 hours per day in idle mode with the display turned off. Determining the energy usage of your Apple device is actually quite simple. Go to Apple's Environmental Responsibility Report page, and you can see the energy diet of every Apple hardware product made back to 2008. Going to the 2012 list, I found that the 27-inch iMac uses 79.8 W of power when it's actively in use, 20.6 W when it's in that "idle mode with display off", 1.03 watts when in sleep mode and .22 W when turned off. Some quick calculations (hours of usage x power usage in Watts / 1000 = energy usage in kWh) showed my total annual energy usage for the iMac to be about 315.4 kWh (kilowatt-hours). Looking at my electrical usage and cost for the past year courtesy of my local electric and gas utility, I was able to determine that I'm being charged about $0.11 per kWh. That iMac that I use for the majority of my work costs me about $34.69 a year to operate. My next calculation was to determine how much energy I'd use if I set the Energy Saver system preference to shut the device down for 9 hours every day when I know I'm not going to use the iMac. In that mode, the iMac would use about 248.7 kWh of energy, or about $27.36 per year. That means that shutting that machine off at night would save about $7.33 per year -- and I waste more than that sometimes in a single app purchase! My last calculation determined how much I'd save if I just set the iMac to sleep when I'm not using it, so basically it's running for about 8 hours and sleeping for 16 hours on weekdays, or running for 2 hours and sleeping for 22 on weekends. In that situation, the iMac uses about 185.1 kWh every year and my annual savings would be about $14.33. Still, that's not all that great. My reticence towards using sleep mode on this computer was based on past experiences where "waking up" just took too damned long, but this iMac jumps back from sleep mode very quickly. While that monetary savings of $14.33 might not be huge, every little kilowatt-hour I can save is indeed money in my pocket. Just think -- I might be able to buy two Starbucks beverages or almost pay for a Lightning to USB cable from the local Apple Store. How about you, readers? Do you shut 'em down every night, let them sleep, or just have the display go dark when you're not using your favorite Mac? Let us know in the comments.
Facebook releases its 2011 energy usage report, details your carbon footprint
More Facebook news, but this time we're back to the numbers instead of reporting on a new feature, improvement or integration. As part of its mission to swap the familiar blue for something of a greener tinge, Facebook released today its carbon footprint and overall energy usage figures for 2011. Turning bio-babble into easy visualizations, the company points out that for the whole year, an active user occupied roughly the same carbon footprint as one medium latte. Or, if you're a fan of the tipple, a couple of glasses of wine. Impressively, 23 percent of the social giant's energy usage came from clean and renewable sources, which puts it well on the way to its 2015 target of 25 percent or more. If you'd like more info and a complete breakdown of the stats, the full report is available at the source link below.
Virgin Atlantic launches low-carbon fuel, aims to halve carbon footprint (video)
Richard Branson was in London today to announce "one of the most exciting developments of our lifetime." Right, so that'd be SpaceShipFour, we presume, capable of landing on the moon? No, not quite, but a low-carbon fuel would definitely be our second guess. Virgin Atlantic is partnering with LanzaTech, a company that specializes in carbon re-use technology, to recycle waste gasses from 65 percent of the world's steel mills. In Branson's own words, they'll be "taking much of the s**t from up the chimney stacks and turning it into aviation fuel." By capturing those gases that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, Virgin would be able to reduce its overall carbon footprint without necessarily reducing the carbon output of its individual aircraft. The airline plans to have the fuel ready for commercial use by 2014, and will begin trials on its routes from London to Shanghai and Delhi around that time -- two cities that have become synonymous with pollution. Jump past the break for an audio-less demonstration video -- that's right, there's nothing wrong with your speakers.
Google details its carbon footprint in new report, makes you think twice about Rickrolling someone
The folks in Mountain View have always been obsessed with performance, but until now, Google had never come clean with the nitty-gritty surrounding power usage. A new report published by the company tells all, revealing that the search giant emits 1.5 million tons of carbon annually; a figure roughly on par with the UN's operational footprint, or slightly more than the amount produced by the entire country of Laos. The docket also breaks down the carbon emissions by activity, too: individual searches yield 0.2g, ten minutes of YouTube emits 1g and the average Gmail user produces 1.2kg of CO2 over a year -- which on average equates to a grand total of 1.46kg of CO2 per plebe across its properties. According to Google, that's a figure that would have been higher had it not custom designed its data centers, achieving a fifty percent reduction in energy usage versus the industry average. Plenty of infographical delight awaits you at the source below.
Gordon Murray reveals new Batmobile, Dark Knight gets serious about reducing carbon footprint
So you've finished building your Batman Forever-style Batmobile, your Tumbler's up on blocks in the front yard, and you're itching for a new project. It's not too early to start planning a DIY version of Gordon Murray's newly unveiled Bat-ride (part of the Batman Live World Arena Tour). The designer drew on his experience with the McLaren F1 for his new concept car, which includes a healthy dose of imagineering: there's a carbon-fiber body that "breathes," as well as LED-lit "virtual wheels." We're not sure how carbon fiber breathes or what virtual wheels are, but as Murray explains in the video below, they're based on Formula One materials as he imagines them 15-20 years from now. He also envisions a greener Dark Knight, whose ride runs on hydrogen fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries -- no longer will the caped crusader suffer a guilty conscience due to his excessive carbon dioxide emissions.
NEC turns your home into a carbon-tracking game controller
Are you bored with keeping tabs of your carbon emissions? NEC and BIGLOBE have developed a system that not only performs this odious task, but makes it "fun" to do so -- if you're generous as to what constitutes "fun." A WiFi-enabled device is attached to your circuit breaker, where it keeps track of your power consumption and later transmits it to your home computer via ZigBee. The data is then sent to a website, where you can use it to play games against other green households in such thrilling arenas as Carbon Diet (users score "eco-points" with which they can purchase virtual soil, water, flowers and grass) and Carbon Ball, in which Dung Beetles compete to see who can travel the farthest, with distance being determined by -- you guessed it -- how well the user reduces power consumption. But that ain't all -- the system also keeps tabs on daily and hourly energy consumption, your rank in comparison with other households, and more. A three-month trial service is underway in the homes of 100 NEC employees, after which the companies will analyze the data and develop a business model for unloading this bad boy on local governments and the private sector. One more pic after the break.[Via Pink Tentacle]
Oslo rolls out biomethane-powered busses
The city of Oslo is getting down and dirty with a new scheme for its public transportation. Adding "minor modifications" to 80 of the city's public busses will allow them to run on biomethane fuel produced from raw sewage. The buses are apparently much quieter, and are more eco-friendly than biogas, with zero net carbon emissions. The leader of the project, Ole Jakob Johansen, also says that the city should save about €.40 per liter on fueling the busses. The trial is part of Oslo's plan to be carbon-neutral by 2050, and they hope to soon have the entire fleet of 400 rolling clean. Waste not, want not, huh? [Via Inhabitat]
HP to put Eco Highlights label on products, guilt comes on the side
HP is doing its part to help you feel good -- or bad -- about your carbon footprint with its new Eco Highlights label. The sticker will list a product's enviro-friendly "ingredients", much like those FDA labels you see at the grocery store that tell you how much fat and sugar you're consuming. The program's launch products will include printers such as the Deskjet D2545 ink-jet printer, LaserJet P4015x, LaserJet P4515x and LaserJet P4515xm which are made mostly of recycled parts. Other Eco Highlights label attributes will include recycled cartridges, recyclable packaging, and auto-on/auto-off with deep-sleep modes. Finally, a new HP Carbon Footprint Calculator for Printing and HP LaserJet Power Calculator will most likely make you feel really bad about the printer you're currently using, send you into a shame spiral, and ultimately force you to buy an HP Eco Highlight printer.[Via News.com]
Are MMOs Captain Planet approved?
Saving the world is something that most have us as gamers have grown rather accustomed to over the years. Almost since the beginning, game designers have used the risk of global destruction as a tool to more completely involve players in the seriousness of a given game narrative. Whether we're preventing our world from being sucked into a demonic alternate dimension, devoured by a horde of merciless alien predators, or being blown up by a clown-faced madman, the stakes are nearly always high. MMOs certainly never bow from using world destruction as a plot-device; it's usually at the center of the end-game.So what then do we make of a post by Tony Walsh on his Clickable Culture blog earlier this month that questions the extent to which MMOs are contributing to the destruction of the very planet most of us inhabit every day? He cites some statistics that estimate the carbon footprint of your typical computer server, such as the ones that power most MMOs, is as big as a gas-guzzling SUV. When you consider the sheer amount of power it must take to keep the servers for World of Warcraft alone running, you start to get an idea of the magnitude of the discussion. Walsh suggests that the best compromise for those who are green at heart is to simply not play MMOs at all.While I have to grant that I had never considered the environmental impact of MMOs before, I disagree with his point that the best option is to cut ourselves off. If we took that approach to power use, we'd scarcely have justification to turn on the heat, let alone power on our computer. I don't doubt that we'll see a "green" MMO that uses carbon-neutral power in the future, I don't think it's something we should worry too much about in the meantime.
Carbon Hero concept promises to keep track of your footprint
While it's not entirely clear how it works, industrial design student Andreas Zachariah claims that his Carbon Hero concept device here will one day keep tabs on your carbon footprint, and he's taken home a prize at the BSI Sustainability Design Awards for his efforts. Supposedly, the device uses "sophisticated sensors" to automatically identify the various forms of transportation you make use of "by virtue of their relative location, velocity and the pattern of their activity." That information then gets offloaded onto a PC or cellphone where you can track just how wasteful your are and calculate the number of carbon offsets you need to purchase to make up for it -- just don't hold your breath for getting one anytime soon.[Via OhGizmo]
