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.
We’ve used them before, to share data, watch movies, store music, play games and lots more. We’re talking about CDs. With the onset of DVDs and now Blu-ray disks, the CD seems somewhat outdated, taken that they hold comparatively lesser data than the other two. And like all outdated things, CDs are slowly but surely meeting their death, most of them ending up in the dump. Artist Bruce Munro thought otherwise, using around a million of these data storage devices to create a work of art.
Sony Ericsson has decided to give their mobile phone market a touch of green, and have come up with the new Cedar. If you’re green minded and look for greener options in every purchase you make, you’re sure to fall in love with this phone. The phone features all the normal stuff we look out in a those little communication devices that control our lives today, and includes a host of greenery too. The Sony Ericsson Cedar features a recycled plastic body, a low power consumption charger, an e-manual.
The Transformer obsession sure hasn’t faded a bit. Well, it looks like people around the world just love these mammoth robots fighting and destroying everyone and everything in their path, and just can’t get enough of building replicas of them. We’ve stumbled across some pretty green Transformer replicas too, many of them life-size and ever intimidating. The last time we heard of a Transformer being recycled out of a junk vehicle was a 32-foot statue by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. This one isn’t that huge though.
Maybe you can’t burn the tarmac in this one, or zip across the checkered flag. Maybe it lacks the “vroom” and the adrenaline rush. But then again, this is probably the greenest a vintage sports car ever got. This alter-ego of the McLaren M8B, the car Denny Hulme drove at the 1969 Can-Am, was created for motorsport for enthusiast Bob Rubin by artist Chris Gilmour, who used just glue and cardboard to construct this full-scale model.
Now who would think those black leaded pencils we’ve been using all along can damage our environment? Well, we might have not paid a lot of attention to fact, but it does. Both, wood and plastic made pencils can cause significant harm to the environment, taken that they result in deforestation and releasing toxic emissions. So, here’s a pencil that uses neither of the two. A pencil made of the material it’s used to stain. Paper! A South Korean company came up with these pencils made of recycled paper.
Now an old Boeing 747 is just too huge to end up in a scrap yard and folded into scrap metal. And then again, why crush this fallen angel when you could simply use its insides for a luxury hotel! And then again, the price at which a 747 sells in scrap is just too less as compared to the cost at which it was brought. Buying price $200 million and sold in scrap for $35,000. That’s too much of a difference to bear with, so turning one of these into a full fledged hotel could help with great financial returns. We love novel ways to vacation. Visiting a beach every summer and a snow clad ski resort every winter loses its charm over the years. Vacationing in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 isn’t going to fade out that easily.
We human beings have sure underestimated and ignored the use of all the waste we produce, and are slowly realizing just how much of an impact recycling could have on our lives. Well, waste water has its uses too, and we’ve just realized that. Creating hydrogen to power up hydrogen fuel cells can be a pain in the backside, though researches have found a novel way to do so. Arizona State University’ Biodesign Institute came up with a way to use wastewater as a feedstock to generate hydrogen for fuel cells. These microbial electrochemical cells, better known as MXCs, use bacterial respiration to liberate electrons which can generate current and ultimately electricity.
Maybe you haven’t thought of it before while carrying that waste bag of yours to the dumpster, but you could actually get rich using a few innovative and clever ideas with that bag in your hands. A few people came up with some pretty awesome ways to get rid of their trash, and make a few bucks too! Take Curt Degerman for instance. The people of Sweden would often see skimming trash bins and eating out of them. What they didn’t realize was this man took the recycling refunds to the stork market, to get richer by $1.4 million before his death. TerraCycle and Tom Szaky have a green tale too. The 19-year old student came up with containers of organic fertilizer produced by worms, using soda bottles to sell these fertilizers and amassing $ 1 million in 2006. He further stepped into the plastic recycling business too.
We’ve heard of things being recycled and reused, giving them a new life and decreasing the stress on landfills to get rid of them. Well, recycling is now being taken to a whole new level. Here’s an entire theater made from recycling. UK will play host to the Jellyfish Theatre by Berlin-based architects Köbberling and Kaltwasser. The theater will be made from scrapped theater sets, which will be recycled into the building blocks of this entertainment building. Kitchen units are to be donated by the public, while the team heads out for a scavenger hunt for unused stuff in construction sites.
