Switch Lighting, creator of the only LED that uses liquid cooling technology, is on the cusp of a breakout year in 2012. The Switch bulb creates the same warm color of an incandescent, yet it’s made with reclaimable or recyclable materials using the Cradle to Cradle methodology. Inside the bulb is a liquid thermal cooling solution that helps cool the LEDs from all sides, producing more light from less LEDs. In fact, a Switch bulb lasts about 25 times longer and uses 80% less energy than an incandescent.
Designer Zeke Shore traces the first tearable vented plastic lid for coffee back to 1967 patent filed by Alan Frank of Philadelphia. Through the decades companies like Solo continually improved the design and the plastic lid became as much a part of American culture as french fries, apple pie and fried butter on a stick.
Today the plastic lid was killed, murdered actually , by a radical reinvention of the disposable coffee mug called Compleat. I give this a design grade of A+. Sustainability grade? Well . . . I’m not sure the planet will notice.
Take-out beverage lids collected in the '90s and early '00s, photographed by sarcoptiform
A couple years ago when I launched Greenovation.TV I posted a video from Brazil about a creative hack to turn soda bottles filled with water into 50 watt equivalent lights. After 700,000 hits on that video, I just found another cool BBC video about a similar use of these inexpensive sun tunnels.
A simple initiative in the Philippines is bringing a bit of brightness into the lives of the country’s poorest people. The project is called “Litre of Light”, and the technology involved is just a plastic bottle filled with water. It’s an environmentally-friendly alternative to an electric light bulb, and it’s virtually free.
Every now and then a designer creates something that takes my breath away. AnnMarie van Splunter has done just that with her design of a “Rubber Tree” for an installation in Mae Sot, Tak, Thailand.
The maxim is to “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” and we add that environmentally speaking reducing is preferred to reuse and reuse is better than recycling. With about 220,000,000 tires being recycled annually in the United States alone we need more creative reuse of this waste stream.
Hello fellow sustainable design geeks. I’m excited to be the new kid on the block on the Sustainable Design Update. Before I start musing about how we live on this planet, I think I should introduce myself.
Since the mid-90s I’ve been inspired by the challenge of Ray Anderson, the founder and chairman of Interface, Inc.. and MissionZero.org, to create a society with zero negative environmental footprint.
My wife and are now fulfilling our family’s goal to restore a home that creates its own energy, creates zero waste and will be a restorative part of our community. We call our house the Mission Zero House.
My Mission Zero goal is to eliminate the negative environmental impact of every home in America.
Our Mission Zero House was selected as one of USA Today‘s “Best Green Homes of 2010″ and called “Sustainable Perfection” by The Atlantic. I’m not sure that it warrants a title of “perfection”, but we’re working on it. It is America’s oldest and Michigan’s first net-zero energy home, meaning it annually produces more energy than our family consumes.
Eco-redesign launched Reuse the Can Competition, which is about the creation of new and innovative ideas and creativity, originality or business fit designs for reusing the metal cans from our daily life. The ideas may be described with simple application scenarios and extended idea with designs or technical solutions. The goal of the contest is to let public to think about our daily life carbon feet print and take every step to reduce it.
The competition is being inspired by the fact that many metal cans are being wasted everyday. In US 16.8 mil college students between the ages of 18 and 24 year chewed at least a piece of gum once every four weeks. In UK, gum is regularly chewed by over 12.2 million people. If only 50% of them consume six cans every year then each year we have to take care of 87 mil cans. To align the cans end by end, the total length is over 8000Km and it is the distance to link United States and United Kingdom together. If we can think a way to reuse the can that store the gum then we can reuse 1305 tons of metal and avoid approximately 2377 tons of CO2 emissions.
The Competition will be carried in three groups: Public, College or Above, Below College. 60 best ideas from the first contest phase which will be ended by 16 September 2009 will win a sustainable design Magnesium Flashlight, three designs from the second contest phase which will be ended by 21 October 2009 will be awarded a Netbook computer and one winner of Innovation and Business Fit will get a the world first Robotic Computer which adapts itself to anyone posture and give a new degree of freedom of work, no matter standing, sitting and whatever you want to.
