business
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Fixies to the people! Building a business on no-frills bikes
Here's the formula: Take a bike, boil it down to the basics -- frame, wheels, pedals, seat, handlebars. Offer it online, cheap. Then stand back and watch people snatch them up.
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Facebook and coal are no longer in a relationship
Until recently, Facebook had an "it's complicated" relationship with coal; an April 2011 Greenpeace report found that 53.2 percent of the company's electricity use was coal-generated. Now, the company is pledging to move away from dirty fuel and work towards powering its operations, including energy-suck data centers, using renewable energy. And they're helping to spread […]
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Apple HQ could have the country’s biggest solar installation, and it still won’t be enough
The current plan for the new Apple headquarters calls for 500,000 or more square feet of solar panels, generating at least 5MW of power. That could make it the biggest corporate solar panel installation in the U.S. — but Apple operations take so much power that this will just be supplemental. The proposed building, which […]
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‘Human centipede’ business model saves 39 million tons of CO2
One company's trash can be another's treasure — for instance, a server farm produces excess heat, making heat a waste product, but a greenhouse runs on heat and considers it a necessity. The U.K.'s National Industrial Symbiosis Program (NISP) helps match up companies that produce waste with companies that need it. Essentially, it's a Human […]
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Investors representing $20 trillion get behind climate change prevention
It's sort of a no-brainer to realize that we need to invest in clean energy technology and get governments to institute policies that support those investments. Greens have been saying that for ages. But greens, for the most part, do not represent $20 trillion in assets. So when people who do wield that amount of […]
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Electric vehicles improve fuel economy even if people don’t buy them
The first version of a radical new technology always gets off to a slow start -- remember what they said about the first iPhone? -- and so it is with the all-electric Nissan Leaf and plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt. Yet both vehicles are having an unexpected effect on their makers' bottom line. By getting people into the showroom, they’re helping to move other fuel efficient vehicles.
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Global investment in clean energy blowin' the hell up
Global total new investment in clean energy 2004-10 ($BN)
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How Gmail saves energy
There are a lot of benefits to cloud computing. For instance, if you believe the commercials, it lets you replace your family’s heads with better heads! Also, it saves you storage space and means you can access your data with multiple devices. But this might be the best argument so far: Switching from local email […]
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A green giant passes: Ray Anderson, sustainable-biz pioneer, dies at 77
Years before every business started angling to be seen as green, Ray Anderson set out to make his company Interface truly sustainable. He passed away today.