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Green Web 2.0 Roundup - February 8th, 2008

February 8th, 2008

I've already written about green power in the Web 2.0 world. This week it's not Google in the news as usual, but Intel. According to the EPA, Intel's purchases of more than 1.3 billion kWh of electricity from renewable sources (which accounts for slightly less than half of the company's power needs) make it the #1 purchaser of green power in the US. Surprisingly, there are few other IT companies on the list - others on the list include PepsiCo (1.1 billion kWh) and my alma mater New York University (132 million kWh). [via Treehugger]

While big purchases like these make the news, there are also ways for individual users to cut down on their energy use. The EcoButton plugs into your USB port and puts your computer into energy-saving sleep mode with one touch. When you get back, simply press any key to return to what you were doing. As an added bonus, the EcoButton's software calculates the power and money saved by using it. The EcoButton is currently available for Windows, but a Mac version is in the works. [via Treehugger]

While the EcoButton is a good solution for existing machines, others are looking for ways to make computers more efficient right out of the box. The Aleutia E1 was designed to offer "off the grid computing" in remote locations where access to electricity is not a given. The E1 uses only 18 watts of power (8 for the CPU and 10 for the LCD monitor) instead of the 200W required by traditional desktop computers. Prices start at 179 GBP, but the steeper 499 GBP option includes folding solar panels, allowing you to work pretty much anywhere. [via Treehugger]

Want to reduce your impact in other ways? Even paperless offices have to print sometimes. GreenPrint software will help you cut down the paper you use by "identify[ing] and delet[ing] unnecessary pages or space—like images you don't need to waste ink on or pages with lone URLs—from your print jobs. GreenPrint also keeps track of just how much money, paper, and greenhouse gases you're saving by using it." GreenPrint estimates that the average user will save about $90 a year in paper and ink. You can download GreenPrint World Edition for free here (Windows only). [via Lifehacker]

Even Showtime is getting in on the act and turning to Web 2.0 technology to save money and resources. In the weeks leading up to the Emmy awards, "members of the Academy [of Television Arts & Sciences] often get several hard copy DVDs in their mailbox – 20+ from Showtime alone." This year, Showtime has eschewed the physical DVDs and partnered with Brightcove to offer digital delivery to voting members who will be able to log in and watch Showtime material online. Not only does this move eliminate the need for materials and fuel to produce and package the DVD and related promotional materials and ship them to the recipient, it's also likely to save Showtime a lot of cash, as "online distribution offers the most economical way in which to deliver digital content." [via Mashable]

Here's one of the most brilliant uses of Web 2.0 technology I've seen in a while - The Washington Post reports that the Achuar Indians of Peru are using a digital camera, a GPS device, and Google Earth to document environmental destruction and put the pressure Occidental Petroleum, who they say are responsible for it. Despite living in a remote Amazon region where inhabitants are "largely cut off from environmental defenders in Washington and other world capitals who might have protected their interests . . . [the] Indians have gained access to tools that level the playing field."

A court case filed in Los Angeles by lawyers representing 24 Peruvians against Occidental is currently making its way through the courts, and the plaintiffs hope that the newly acquired photographic evidence will strengthen their case. [via Treehugger]

And finally, in a hilarious rant entitled "Hey, You Condescending Jerk, No One Prints Emails Anyway" Michael Arrington argues against the ubiquitous green reminder seen above. (I happen to agree with him.) [via TechCrunch]

This will be my last Green Web 2.0 Roundup blog for Buddylube. Thanks for reading, and please consider the environment before printing this blog post.

-Annalisa

[Originally written for Buddylube]

Green Web 2.0 Roundup - January 25, 2008

January 25, 2008

In honor of NYC's new plastic bag recycling initiative, this week I want to take a look at another part of the web 2.0 gadget life cycle - what do you do with all those electronic toys when you're done with them?

Can you hear me now? Photo Credit: "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait" by Chris Jordan at chrisjordan.com (Thanks Adam for the tip!)

Let's start with that ubiquitous modern accessory, the cell phone, 426,000 of which are "retired" every day in America. Assuming yours still works and you just want to upgrade, you can put it to work by donating it. The Center for Domestic Violence Prevention's CORA (Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse), the Wireless Network Foundation's CALL TO PROTECT, and other similar programs like them provide them to victims and survivors of domestic violence who would otherwise go without this lifeline. Other groups collect cell phones as a fundraising method. Cell Phones for Soldiers, for example, collects and sells phones to purchase calling cards for service members stationed overseas. They'll even pay for your postage when mailing in a phone. For a list of ways to donate your phone to a good cause, visit CollectiveGood.

If your phone's completely shot, there are still alternatives to tossing it in the trash. VOIP-news gives you 50 ways to leave your lover, er, cellular. Some, like BetterBuyBack.com and CellforCash will buy your phone. Why would someone pay for your broken phone? VOIP-news explains that "a used cell phone’s value lies mainly in small amounts of minerals in its circuits — gold, nickel and especially tantalum," which is "vital to manufacturing cell phones and many other electronic devices." [via VOIP-news]

If you've got a bigger item like a keyboard or CRT monitor sitting around collecting dust, you're not alone. According to the EPA, "used or unwanted electronics amounted to approximately 1.9 to 2.2 million tons" of e-waste in 2005 alone. Call2Recycle and RECONNECT both provide information about drop off sites for electronics recycling, a process that ensures that materials like lead and arsenic don't end up in a landfill where they can leak into the soil and water. Electronics manufacturers and retailers are also starting to take back products at the end of their life cycle, something I learned about firsthand while trying to recycle by iPod earbugs (read about my adventures here). Recently, Sharp, Toshiba, and Panasonic announced plans to form the Electronic Manufacturers Recycling Management Company, or MRM, to coordinate nationwide ewaste recycling programs. [via Treehugger]

Electronics recycling, however, is not without its problems. Separating and extracting the valuable metals and hazardous materials from the devices being recycled poses significant health risks to the workers exposed to them. This is a major problem in developing countries like China and India where the e-waste recycling industry has proliferated, and arguably in violation of the Basel Convention, which prohibits shipping hazardous wastes to other countries. (You can read more about this issue on the Basel Action Network's website.) Apple is one of the few companies to actively address this issue. A statement on the "Greener Apple" website reads "All the e-waste we collect in North America is processed in the U.S., and nothing is shipped overseas for disposal. We carefully review 'environmental fate' submissions from each vendor, so we know how raw materials are handled at the end of the recycling process . . . we also review the performance of their downstream vendors. They must comply with all applicable health and safety laws." [via Treehugger]

Of course, the best way to avoid the environmental and health effects of hazardous wastes is to avoid them in the first place. This is the thinking behind the greening of the Macbook Air and the One Laptop Per Child project's XO (both discussed last week). But until manufacturers and end users phase out these materials, recycling remains the best option available.

-Annalisa

[Originally written for Buddylube]

Green Web 2.0 Roundup - January 18, 2008

January 18, 2008

Last week I mentioned the new Earth Class Mail. This week another snail mail service is making the news. ProQuo reduces your junk mail (and the amount of energy and raw materials used to produce it) by removing your name from direct marketing lists. A free service, ProQuo provides an online dashboard where you can choose which lists to remove yourself from. There's also a section for opting out of telemarketing calls. Somewhat ironically, ProQuo is supported by online advertising and displays ads from the companies you've chosen to remain subscribed to. [via Mashable]

Another option for reducing your junk mail's environmental impact is GreenDimes, one of Buddylube's newest clients. Unlike ProQuo, which requires you to return often to unsubscribe from new lists, GreenDimes is full-service. For $20 a year, they will remove you from direct marketing lists and monitor new lists to make sure it stays off. Members can also login to the Catalog Screener to opt-out of catalogs and non-profit mailings while still receiving the ones they want. A year's membership covers all of a household's members (and their various misspellings), names of past tenants, and mail addressed to "Resident," "Occupant," etc.

In addition to rescuing trees and water destined to end up as a ValPak, GreenDimes also partners with three reforestation initiatives (American Forests, Sustainable Harvest International, and Trees for the Future) to plant 10 trees on behalf of every new member - 5 for signing up and 1 for each of the first five catalogs canceled.

As I've mentioned in previous posts (here and here), all the green Web 2.0 sites I blog about require electricity to power them and a computer to view them. Technology is all about gadgets, which are not necessarily great for the planet, but are certainly not going away anytime soon. The solution? Make them greener! I've already mentioned the Solio portable electronics charger and the Voltaic Systems Generator bag - here are some creative ways to get your Web 2.0 fix without feeling too guilty about supporting the local coal-fired power plant:


The Twirl N' Take Camera (above), part of Sony's ODO series of hand-powered electronics, requires no electricity and is recharged by rolling the green wheel across a flat surface. Indicators around the wheel light up as the camera, which is located in the handle, charges. In order to cut down the amount of power necessary, the camera Twirl N' Take has no display screen, which might make it less attractive to photographers used to viewing pictures immediately. Although the ODO products are still in the prototype phase, Sony has announced plans to produce them with recycled plastic. [via Treehugger]


If the Twirl N' Take Camera looks familiar, it's probably because you've seen that color scheme before. The One Laptop per Child Project's XO computer (pictured above) was designed for use by children in remote area without consistent access to electricity. Features such as a screen that consumes 14% of the power used by a traditional LCD (2.7% in black and white mode) and a CPU that requires only 10% of the power used by most laptops mean that the XO can recharged by a child using a foot pedal, hand crank, or pull cord. A solar option is also available. Additionally, the XO contains no hazardous materials or toxic heavy metals, which means it can be recycled safely.

Similar claims are being made by the brand new Macbook Air, which flaunts its green cred with changes such as a recyclable aluminum frame, PVC and bromide-free circuitry, LCD screen free from mercury and arsenic, and 50% less packaging. [via EcoChick]

Laptops are, as a rule, a more eco-friendly choice than traditional desktop computers, and 2007 marked the first year when their sales outpaced those of desktops. According to Treehugger, the benefits of this are two-fold: "Less 'stuff' is needed to get online and fewer watts needed to stay there," a situation which results in "reduced resource consumption all around. " [via Treehugger]

-Annalisa

Green Web 2.0 Roundup - January 11, 2008

January 11, 2008

Lots of green sites appeared in Yahoo UK/Ireland's "Finds of the Year," a roundup of "the most interesting and innovative websites" of 2007. The majority of the Ethical category awards went to green sites, including two of my personal favorites The Nag (an Anti-Apathy project that "nags" members to make one green change a month) and Green Thing (a community whose members collect green, well, things by participating in that month's challenge) as well as Eat The Seasons (which encourages eating locally grown seasonal produce to cut down on food miles) and Trees for Cities (a London-based charity dedicated to planting trees in urban areas).

The Shopping category featured Nigel's EcoStore, a retail site devoted to green products, while the Charity category highlighted Together.com, a site with simple actions that readers can do to help the environment (a US site is coming soon) and 180 Degrees, an Adidas-sponsored interactive travelogue of two young British explorers attempting to travel from the North Pole to the South Pole using only the human and wind power of skis, bicycles, and sails to raise awareness about climate change. [via Treehugger]

While 180 Degrees might be the most ambitious, it's certainly not the only project that aims to bring firsthand experiences with climate change to the Web 2.0 audience. Explorer Will Steger recently completed a journey across Canada's Baffin Island where he stopped in Inuit villages to interview locals and document their experiences with climate change. A former high-school science teacher, Steger made sure his team uploaded podcasts and blog-style "dispatches" from the road to his website Global Warming 101 so that students could follow his progress from home. That's way cooler than the Voyage of the Mimi videos I had to watch in 6th grade. [via Treehugger]

Paul D. Miller, who journeyed across Antarctica to make field recordings of the sounds he heard there, is teaming up with DJ Spooky to raise awareness of climate change through art and new media. Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite, which is described as a "large scale multimedia performance work will be an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent," whose soundtrack will be made up entirely from Miller's recordings of surface of the ice. A video with more information is available here. [Thanks to Hammarsing for the tip]

Also in the news this week was Voltaic Systems' addition of the Generator, a solar-powered laptop carrying case and charger to their line of mobile solar bags. At $599, it's not cheap, but it will generate and store enough power to run a laptop after a day in direct sunlight - an indicator light in the handle shows you when the panels are charging. The fabric of the bag comes in 4 colors and is made from recycled soda bottles. [via Treehugger]

If you're on the road with your laptop and maybe a solar-powered cell phone charger and don't have time to open, read, sort, and recycle your mail, a service called Earth Class Mail will do it for you. Your mail is delivered to a P.O. Box, where Earth Class Mail scans all of your envelopes for you to browse online. You can then choose to have the envelope opened and scanned securely as a PDF, shredded, recycled, or forwarded to another person or location. The cost of the service runs from $9.95/month for a basic personal plan to $59.95/month for businesses (all plans also require a $25 setup fee) and is being touted as a simple way to manage postal mail from anywhere in the world. Plus, it saves you a trip to the local post office or recycling center. [via Mashable]


-Annalisa

Green Web 2.0 Roundup - December 21, 2007

December 21, 2007

Last week, I wrote about the energy used to power green sites and applications and some things Web 2.0 denizens can do to reduce their impact. This week I want to take a step even further back and look at what's powering the sites themselves and the challenge of greening this step of the energy supply chain.

OK, maybe it's nice to think that when we flip the switch and type in the URL the page magically loads. But somewhere, a server in a data center is storing the information and sucking up electricity. In addition to running the servers, the data center must also keep them cool. As any Buddylube employee can tell you, an overheated server is no fun. This, of course, requires more energy. In fact, for every watt required to run a server, the average data center requires nearly the same amount of energy to keep it cool (New York Times). According to the EPA, energy consumption by data centers is expected to double between now and 2011. If we are to avoid the environmental and financial burden of building more and more data centers and plants to power them, energy efficiency is going to have to become a priority.

The first step is more efficient servers. Unlike consumer products like cars or water heaters, federal energy standards don't apply to servers and the Energy Star program doesn't evaluate their efficiency. Furthermore, they can't run in energy-saving mode like most home computers. Some companies have taken matters in to their own hands - According to William E. Weihl, director of energy strategy, Google builds its own servers with more efficient components.

For the rest of us without this option, another option is more efficient data centers. Hewlett-Packard, one of the companies offering "thermal mapping" to data centers, provides color-coded images that display the current temperatures of the room so that air can be directed appropriately.“If you don’t have a profound understanding of where the hot spots are, you just overchill everything,” says Brian Brouillette, a VP at Hewlett-Packard. “It’s like if in your house you kept the air-conditioning on full tilt because one room had poor air circulation.”

Of course, data centers will also require some amount of power, and luckily there are green options out there. Some purchase renewable energy from the grid, the way Buddylube purchases green energy from local windfarms. These include SustainableWebsites, GoGreenHosting, and ThinkHost, who also plant a tree for each new client. GreenestHost takes it a step further and generates power "off the grid" to run the servers behind the sites they host. 120 panels soak up the Southern California sun to power a date center approximately 90 miles northeast of San Diego. A backup generator powered by cleaner-burning propane is on hand in case of a outage in the main system. In addition to solar energy, the data center is cooled by an Energy Star compliant system that sucks in outside air when the temperature falls below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

This week and last, we've learned where the internet comes from and how green it is (or isn't). While individual Web 2.0 users might not be able to impact the efficiency of the servers on the market or data center cooling methods, more and more choices are available to green consumers, from green hosting for a an interactive website to offsetting a single Facebook profile.

- Annalisa

Green Web 2.0 Roundup - December 17, 2007

December 17, 2007

While we're all recovering from the First Annual Luby Awards (where we enjoyed some green beer from the Brooklyn Brewery), here's a look at what's going green in the Web 2.0 world.

We all know that shopping online is a little greener than filling up the tank and driving to the mall and that paying bills online saves the cost of a stamp and the fuel needed to deliver a letter, but let's not forget that websites have their own ecological footprint. Web 2.0 is made possible by computers, routers, and servers that use electricity which can be generated in a variety of ways. This week and next, we'll be taking a look at the power behind the power of the Web 2.0 revolution.

Social networking juggernaut Facebook now boasts dozens of green applications offering everything from daily tips to environmentally conscious gifts, but the ones that really stand out from the crowd are the applications that actually make an impact. You can also offset your profile's carbon footprint with the Greenbook application. With money generated by advertising sponsors, the Greenbook team purchases offsets for a certain amount of CO2, and then distributes the offsets among the members who have added the application.

Worried about your blog's impact? The CO2Stats Project widget lets you calculate and offset the CO2 generated by your readers. Unlike the Greenbook application, which divides the offsets equally, this widget uses pageview metrics to calculate exactly how much energy is being used to display the page and then offsets it for free. The offsets are provided by Sustainable Travel International, although it's not quite clear who's paying since there are no advertisements on the website or in the widget.

Google, a voracious consumer of computing power, is turning to the sun to generate electricity, an obvious choice given the company's California location. Solar panels on the roof of the Googleplex (below) were completed in May and now comprise the largest corporate installation in the world. Google reports that they have reduced the amount of energy purchased from the "grid" of traditional outside sources by 30%, and estimates that the panels will pay for themselves in 7 years. [via Treehugger]

On November 27th, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, announced plans to take this idea further with the "Renewable Cheaper Than Coal" initiative. RE<C, as it's known, will focus on developing alternative renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal power in an effort to combat climate change and perhaps even take on the old guard of oil and coal companies. According to a press release issued by the company, RE<C aims "to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades." Google goes on to put this number into perspective by reminding us that one gigawatt is enough energy to power a city the size of San Francisco. Ambitious, certainly, but not impossible.

Stay tuned for next week, when we take a closer look at the problems of powering servers and data centers and some possible solutions for producing green electricity on a larger scale in the US.

-Annalisa