The blockbuster 3D animation film of the year, Avatar has sure left a train of thrown away 3D glasses behind. Laid end to end, these glasses will cover a whopping 3,987 miles, the distance between Los Angeles to Angmagssalik, Greenland. This is around 42.1 million pairs of glasses worn, or 935,834 a day. Now disposing off all these glasses is sure to create a mountain of plastic. To prevent these, companies providing 3D systems like IMAX, Dolby Laboratories, Real-D and XpanD have cracked their brains and put forth a recycling program. IMAX claims that its glasses can be washed 500 times using a glass cleaning machine. Glasses by Dolby and XpanD are also reusable. The companies claim that there is no use of throwing them away since they can be easily cleaned and made sterile.

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Apple notebooks are now seeing a new after-life and are being recycled into – watch out for this – wall clocks. It may sound weird to have a wall clock shaped like an Apple notebook, but then again, it looks cool! Made from a recycled iBook G4 case, the Apple iBook G4 Clock uses a mouse for a pendulum. Powered by two AA batteries, the clock measures around 14 inches wide by 18 inches in height and boasts a quartz clock movement, and pendulum movement. The clock is customized to its core and can also be tweaked and modified further according to the buyer’s specifications.

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Well here’s a chance you have to do your bit for the environment. You can vote on a sustainable solution for greener gadgets that can help reduce carbon footprint and emissions on a large scale. If you’re confused where to start, here’s a product that deserves a vote for its innovation and sheer awesomeness. A contraption known as the Go Mechanical Charger by Elephant is the newest innovation on the block that is sure to help change the world and the way we communicate. We all face the irritable and frustrating situation of having our cell phone batteries run dry during use. The Go charger is an answer to your problems and will charge your phone’s batteries on the go! Equipped with a dual charging system that involves a roll-on or hand crank, this portable charging device is environment friendly and uses human power to charge up our batteries.

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Shipping containers are finding more uses nowadays than just ferrying things around on sea. This time, shipping containers will provide shelter and a place to rest and live for Boy Scouts. Contributed by Richard Hammond and Gensler's Santa Monica for a Boy Scouts’ playground in Emerald Bay, this cabin was made out of a recycled shipping container and boasts a whole load of features that makes it livable in. Using reclaimed lumber, durable rubber flooring, solar photovoltaic’ cells to power it up and LED lighting, this shipping container is sure to bring a sparkle in those Boy Scouts’ eyes. The roof of this camp house is made of a stretched silicone-coated fiberglass material. 20 cabins like these will be built for Camp Emerald Bay. Let’s hope the Scouts love this idea as much as we do!

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Now lighting up highways that pass through deserts, mountains and other far of locations can be a pain, considering the fact that they need to be constantly maintained, powered and burn up a whole lot of energy from the grid. Well here’s an awesome and innovative solution to power up those lights that help us see those long miles ahead. The guys at TAK Studios came up with the Turbine Light. As the name suggests, these wind powered lights use the air produced by the cars zipping by to make their individual turbines turn and produce energy. Though critics are skeptical that the energy produced will be enough to spark the lights on, cities can also switch on to solar powered lighting! Hopefully cars on highways zip around fast enough and get these cool streetlights up and running.

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What happens when a company is growing but cannot keep up with the power bills? It decides to go green! But I don’t think that's what happened with Facebook. Their new Oregon data center will now be powered by a coal plant in Idaho to reduce costs. According to a report from the Energy Information Administration, the last 5 years the data center's power consumption has grown to 1.4 percent of the total energy use in the country! But in a bid to reduce their overall carbon foot print, the Pineville-based data center would be equipped with an outside-air intake system to cool the massive data servers, thus creating a health mix of renewable energy based power-grid!

[Treehugger]

If you struggle with frequent load shedding or are just plain environment friendly and want to restrict the use of electricity in your daily chores, why not move to an energy efficient vacuum cleaner instead? Miele Hybrid is said to be the first vacuum cleaner that can work with lithium-ion batteries, for a chord-free cleaning experience. You can charge the lightweight and powerful lithium-ion batteries automatically by using the power chord. These batteries are clean and can last for 10 years. It also guarantees enough power to the 1,800 watt motor, so that you can clean with the same efficiency. They require 3-hours to charge. Once charged, the batteries can be used for a non-stop 20 minutes without power assistance.

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The Winter Olympics is going green, literally. Due to the heavy rain s in Vancouver, the snow cover on the mountain slopes is little due to which it is now being referred to as the Spring Olympics. Well, its not just he weather that has the Olympics go green. A few sustainable ideas have been put across and used like the medals made out of recycled circuit boards. These medals were melted from gold, silver and bronze in the boards by a Canadian mining company. The torch will be passed using canoes and electric scooters with zero emissions. On Whistler Mountain that will play host to the athlete’s village, funky bus shelters and benches with body shapes have been constructed. They help us reflect on the fact that exercise and yoga are vital to a healthy human life.

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The globally acclaimed environment hugging green car, the Toyota Prius is now in the spotlight, for the wrong reasons. The company claims that a software goof up has caused braking problems for the car’s 2010 model and have not recalled any. According to Toyota officials, a disconnect in the car’s ABS (Anti-lock Break System) causes a lag less than one second which will make a car travelling at 60mph have its breaks holding on after it has covered a good 90 feet. Hybrid cars use different breaking systems that also incorporate the use of electric motors besides the contemporary friction depending ones. This also generates electricity to charge the car’s batteries. The government of Japan has asked the company to look into the issue more seriously.

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If you do survive for the next 300,000, you better learn to swim. The guys at NASA have looked into their crystal ball once again and have predicted the rising of the sea level globally by 197 feet. According to the Earth Observatory of NASA, the continent of Antarctica has been losing out on around a hundred cubic kilometers of ice annually since the year 2002. However these claims might be false after all, since satellite imagery shows that Antarctica is cooling, and the Antarctic sea ice is expanding. It would roughly take around 300,000 years for all this ice to actually melt and drown us and more than 18,000 years for the sea to rise 60 meters.

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Fossil fuel being used to provide energy will soon be a memory from the past with the development of new alternative means to produce energy. Well here are the five newest ways to a cleaner energy production in the future. And we’re not talking about the age old solar power or wind power concept. Helioculture is a process by which hydrocarbons are produced using the suns energy. Sewage can be used as another energy producer using microbial fuel cells and bio-electrochemical systems. Besides creating rain, evaporation can now help produce energy too by harnessing the difference in electrical properties that exist between air and water. Human movement is one of the coolest means to energy being developed wherein the principals of piezoelectricity will be used to harness energy out of human body movements. Just like the sun, the moon will help produce energy too with the use of a light isotope known as Helium-3 found on it.

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The guys at Jaguar Land Rover are still in their workplaces piecing together on a whole series of hybrid vehicles. The company believes in the General Motors ideology of using a small range-extending gasoline engine to charge car batteries on the go which will help make electric cars more feasible in the future. British company, Lotus have conveyed a 1.2 liter three-cylinder engine capable of generating 35kW of power that the 2011 XJ sedan will carry inside its belly along with a lithium ion battery pack. The electric motor supplies 145kW of power with 295 pound-feet torque. This will deliver a range of 600 miles with 47 miles per gallon fuel requirement and a top speed of 112 miles an hour. All this will enable the car to give out lesser carbon emissions; under 120 g/km to be precise.

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Apart from being able to harness the solar energy, not much could be done in terms of using alternative energy sources at home. Big industries and companies no doubt innovate various methods, but at home not much can be experimented with. But now, with the Wind Turbine WT6500 being made available to our homes by WindTronics and Honeywell, things are looking upwards. Capable of producing 2000 kWh/yr in class 3 winds, the WT6500 would generate about 18% percent of the average household’s annual electricity needs, this Do-It-Yourself turbine is very innovative, in the sense that the power generation is done at the blades unlike the traditional ones that use gears.

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San Francisco will be witnessing a remarkable transformation from a simple Transbay Terminal with a green building. This step will centralize the region’s transportation network by collaborating the 9 transportation systems. The Transbay Centre project has three components. The first replaces the current terminal, which policymakers have called outdated. The second extends the Caltrain rail line 1.3 miles into the heart of the downtown financial centre. The third element will see the area surrounding the centre redeveloped with 2,600 new homes, parks, and a retail complex.

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The Pillow’s Degree Celsius by Yuan-Hao Hsu gives you everything that you’d ever require for a good night’s sleep. Everything ranging from a massage to heating to having an aroma dispenser, it ensures you do not complain when you wake up the next morning. But only if sleeping could solve all problems relating to the environment, wouldn’t you be proud about dozing off everywhere? Here is where the real feature of the pillow lies. It’s got a solar charging option. So now you just don’t burn calories while sleeping, you save the planet too!

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