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Recycle on November 20, 2013
Well, if you don’t have an iPhone, or to be more precise, if a broken iPhone is what you’ve got, you’ve also got the raw material for some pretty pieces of artwork! Gadgets like the iPhone do meet their end sooner or later by way of accident and instead of mourning the demise of old iPhones, repair company, Twice Used, is using broken iPhone components to create fabulous furniture pieces and art! Using throw-away parts including broken shells, screens and the like, Twice Used has come up with a range of awe-striking creations.
American electric carmaker Tesla Motors, has finally stepped onto British soil! The company opened its first outlet in the UK in the Westfield Shopping Centre in London’s White City. The showroom will sell left hand drive versions of the Model S at this showroom, while a right hand drive version of the car will only be made available after March 2014. The car will come with a pricetag of £49,000, after the £5,000 government grant and we think this will indeed attract quite a few takers in the United Kingdom.
The jolly folks at Volvo have managed to stun the world with some jaw-dropping innovations quite often before and has done so again with this fantastic pavilion we spotted recently. Created by Los Angeles-based Synthesis Design + Architecture, this tensile pavilion sports solar panels and is foldable too! Once deployed, the pavilion’s solar panels soak in energy from the sun and use this to charge the car beneath, in this case being the new electric hybrid Volvo V60. The pavilion can then be folded completely and fitted inside trunk of the car!
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Recycle on November 18, 2013
Smoking cigarettes destroys your lungs, but that isn’t all the damage these death-sticks do. Cigarette butts are known to choke drains and pollute the environment, given the fact that they take particularly long to blend back into nature. The City of Vancouver decided to give the environment some relief from these destructive cigarette butts and came up with the first recycling program to put to rest these remnants of human vices. Cigarette Waste Brigade pilot project kicked-off with the installation of 110 recycling receptacles.
German auto-manufacturing giant Volkswagen has finally given its lovable hatchback, the Golf, an electric overhaul. The company has announced the all electric version of the Golf and will show off the car at the LA Auto Show. The 2015 e-Golf chucks away the gas and diesel engines and uses an electric motor instead. The motor manages to churn out about 115 horsepower and 199 pound-feet of torque. Powered by a 24.2-kWh liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery pack, the e-Golf takes 10.4 seconds to touch the 60mph mark, good enough for an urban electric ride.
Social networking is a great way to stay connected with people you wouldn’t want to regularly pick up a phone and call but let’s face it; these activities do cast a blotch of carbon on the environment. Keeping this in mind, the world’s largest social network today, Facebook, has decided to take a green jump. The company has decided to have an entire data center powered by wind energy. Located in Altoona, Iowa, the data center will be 100% powered by wind energy from a nearby windfarm project.
The United Kingdom seems to have fallen head-over-heels and completely in love with electric cars and government figures prove just that! The sale of EVs in UK has taken a 25% leap and is currently at a record high! According to a government report, new registrations under the government’s £5,000 grant scheme touched 1,149, the highest recorded number since the initiation of the scheme in January 2011. This news does re-enlighten our hope for a greener future where people around the world will step away from environment-killing fossil fuels and settle for much greener and less carbon-emitting options, like EVs!
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Recycle on November 14, 2013
Not everyone on this planet we call home has access to fresh water and quite a substantial part of the world’s population has to travel distances for potable water supply. It’s only fair that the privileged few waste less water and adopt a sense of water conservation. Swedish industrial designer Mehrdad Mahdjoubi thought so too and came up with the OrbSys Shower concept, a high-tech purification system that recycles water while you wash! Quoting Mahdjoubi, “With my shower, which is constantly recycling water, you’d only use about five liters of water for a 10 minute shower … In a regular shower you would use 150 liters of water — 30 times as much. It’s a lot of savings.”
Going green doesn’t cost much and all it needs is the heart and mind in the right place! One low-income school in Hong Kong recently proved this by being titled as one of the Greenest Schools on Earth by the U.S. Green Building Council! So how did the Sing Yin Secondary School manage the incredible without blowing away its funding to smithereens? The school put to use a bunch of energy-efficient installations including solar panels, green roofs and wind turbines. All of these add to the Sing Yin Secondary School’s eco-efficiency.
Just a couple of years back the idea of electric vehicles had little acceptance with masses as the fear attached to the environment friendly vehicles outweighed its immense promise. Back then, the technology was still a work in progress and the lack of range and charging issues impeded sales. But since then, EVs have not only become more refined but have successfully been able to shed its celebrity toy image. BMW, a company know to build driver focused cars, entered the market by launching its first mass-production electric vehicle, the i3, in July this year. With its radical design, the i3 exhibits a superior level of sophistication. Designed ground up to be powered by an electric drive system, BMW claims the i3 doesn’t compromise on driving pleasure and feels natural, just like regular cars.
