Climate Technology
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How do you calculate your plastic footprint?
Companies are on board with reporting their carbon usage, but what about the amount of plastic they produce? It's a different sort of problem than carbon emissions, but although the negative impacts of humanity's plastic habit have been known for years, the amount being used is only increasing.
This fall, the Hong Kong-based Ocean Recovery Alliance is moving forward with its Plastic Disclosure Project, which will ask companies to calculate and disclose their "plastic footprints," just as they report their carbon footprints. -
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Paul Hawken pays tribute to green-biz visionary Ray Anderson
Ray Anderson, a pioneering sustainable business leader, passed away Monday. At a Thursday memorial service, Paul Hawken paid tribute with this eulogy.
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The EV-hater's guide to hating electric cars
If you listen to mainstream media, you already know electric vehicles are a dismal failure. Here's a list of reasons why, in case you need help defending your EV-hating position.
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IKEA to go 100 percent renewable, starting with 67 wind turbines
Lots of companies talk about going green, but the scale of Swedish furniture retailer IKEA's ambition is breathtaking. In its quest to get 100 percent renewable, the firm skipped right over the usual, intermediate step of buying renewable power from a third party.
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Buy an electric car, get a steep discount on the rooftop solar panels required to charge it
Ford has teamed up with SunPower to offer buyers of its forthcoming Ford Focus Electric a significant discount on SunPower's home solar power systems. This is more than just two companies teaming up to target a demographic likely to want to be interested in both their products: It also makes sense in terms of helping families get off of oil and coal at the same time.
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New LCD screens will make your iPhone solar-powered
What if you could simply leave your iPhone face-up on a table or windowsill in order to trickle charge it and extend its battery? And what if the same technology that turned its screen into a photovoltaic panel also made its display significantly more efficient than current displays, leading to substantially increased battery life even if you're trapped inside a cave?
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If the ‘smart grid’ gets too smart it will destroy itself, says study
If our utility company gives us too much information about the price of electricity -- a cornerstone of the "smart grid" -- we'll probably use that information to crash the grid and cause massive blackouts, says a new study from MIT.
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Wind turbines are about to become way more awesome
Wind power is pretty bad-ass to begin with, but conventional wisdom is that it's a "mature" technology that, unlike solar and other breakthrough energy technologies, won't be seeing much improvement in the coming decades. WRONGITY WRONG WRONG.
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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.
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U.K. media down on renewable energy
The news media often gets flack for its "balanced" reporting on climate change that gives undue credence to climate skeptics. But in the U.K., at least, high-circulation newspapers can’t even claim balance when it comes to renewable energy. The Guardian reports on a study of news coverage of renewable energy in July 2009, when the discussion was largely about the "pros and cons of low-carbon energy sources.” The results:
