Last year, Facebook opened its first LEED certified Open Compute Data Center in Prineville Oregon. It is also building a second building sometime this year. The links below are for some pretty impressive videos introducing the technology behind the datacenters highlighting the custom built OpenCompute servers, racks, UPS, and the evaporative cooling system that uses the outside air.

Part 1

Part 2

EcoTuesday is a unique, structured monthly networking event for sustainable business leaders held concurrently in cities across the country. At the 5th Anniversary event held at the Bentley Reserve, the guest speaker was Brian Back from Sustainable Industries Magazine. Here are some images from the event below, the full set of images can be found here.

This is an interesting way to reuse a soda bottle and literally help brighten the day for poor villages in the Philippines.

“Isang Litrong Liwanag (A Liter of Light), is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly Solar Bottle Bulb to disprivileged communities nationwide. Designed and developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Solar Bottle Bulb is based on the principles of Appropriate Technologies – a concept that provides simple and easily replicable technologies that address basic needs in developing communities.”

Mathieu Young took some cool pictures of The Moonlight, which is a solar lantern built and designed for Cambodians by Kamworks in 2009. Over 70% of Cambodia has no public access to power grids and traditionally, kerosene lamps were used but can be very unhealthy and dangerous in the straw and wooden houses in Cambodia. The MoonLight is also very affordable and can be rented for less than $0.08/day. The features and benefits of the Moonlight listed below from Kamworks, shows basically no reason for anyone to ever use kerosene lamps in Cambodia again.

Features
• Rain water proof
• Yellow cord
• Handy pole support
• Separate panel (allowing to keep lamp inside)
• Flexible useage
• Longlasting LEDs.

Benefits
The MoonLight is a perfect alternative for traditional lights, reducing household spending. Field tests in Cambodia have shown that rural villagers find the MoonLight much better than a kerosene lamp:

• Payback time is less than 1 year compared to kerosene
• Much brighter light than a kerosene lamp
• No fire risk
• The Moonlight is not affected by the wind

I am not an authority on sustainability. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area I vividly remember learning about recycling, No Dumping Drains to Bay campaign and seeing photos of seagulls with six pack soda rings around their necks. Of course who could forget the “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down” campaign during the drought years! My philosophy is that I don’t want to lecture or guilt anyone into acting more environmentally responsible because it is ineffective if not internalize.

I do hope to present basic information that makes financial and logical sense. I recently had the opportunity to live outside of California and learned that there are many uniformed and uninterested populations. I am extremely grateful that the Bay Area is extremely progressive however the cause requires more than a small segment of practitioners to make a difference.

This is an avenue for me to reach an audience who shares the same commitment and hopefully those who are just exploring the topic for simple answers. My goal is to merely share with you topics I found thought provoking and tips that I found useful. The Internet and sustainability are two very daunting, especially when combined. This will also serve as my reference to keep the information I research straight and updated.

Recycling 101
Most people are familiar with what is recyclable but often these NON-recyclable items end up in the bin. Each city’s recycling program varies in what they will accept. Almost all plastics are recyclable which is why you see that recycle triangle imprint. However, it is only valuable to the recycling center if there is a demand for that type of recycled plastic. With no buyer then there is no incentive to accept it for recycling.  The system only works if the recycling plant is able to produce a quality product that manufacturers can utilize to produce quality products. Consumers won’t pay for inferior products so let’s support the use of recycled material by being responsible recyclers!

South San Francisco – 94080

Items NOT Recyclable (even if there is a recyclable symbol) – toss in trash!

• Glass jar metal lids
• Beer caps
• Water, soda, milk, juice bottle caps
• Aerosol can plastic caps
• Clam-shell plastic boxes such as strawberries and takeout containers
• Plastic shrink wrap around value/family packs of bottle water and soda
• Pizza boxes or any soiled paper
• Plastic coated drink boxes (aseptic tetra pak) such as juice boxes and broth/stock boxes
• Freezer food boxes which contain a plastic coating (refrigerated food boxes are recyclable)

Why is it important?

• Contamination
• Plastic bottle caps and clam-shell boxes are made of different types of plastic then plastic bottles which reduce the quality of plastic produced from recycled plastic bottles.
• Paper and cardboard soiled with food or grease contaminates the recycled paper. The process involves water (oil and water don’t mix).
• Extra Work – extra labor at recycling center to remove contaminates

Solution

• Put a labeled container next to the recycling bin to collect these NON-Recyclable items.
• Reduce consumption of single serve beverages! You are paying more for the packaging than the consumable product.
• Replace broth/stock with chicken/beef base. Why pay a premium for water? Save money and packaging!!!

One 16 oz Organic Better Than Bouillon jar $6.89 Costco
Equivalent
76 – 8 ounce cans ≈ $29.18 Costco
OR
19 – 1 quart aseptic tetra paks ≈ $34.17 Costco

I welcome your comments on the topic!

Sources
http://www.ssfscavenger.com/SplitCart%20NEW.pdf
http://www.ecocycle.org/faq/containers.cfm
http://earth911.com/news/2009/03/02/the-pizza-box-mystery/

ActiveIon is a new revolutionary household cleaning device that allows you to clean with only tap water and no chemicals. It is suppose to eliminate 99.9% of all household germs. You fill it up with water and it will add an electrical charge before you spray it, ionizing the water. Once the ionized water hits the dirt, it will lift it up from the surface allowing you to easily wipe it away.

If it really works, that would be cool to have something that can clean without chemicals or fragances. It is very environmentally friendly and it is practically as green as you can get to cleaning with just water. This seems like a cool gadget, but it is going to have a very hard time convincing people to buy something that costs $179 to spray water for cleaning. First of all, people will find it hard to believe that ionized water can really make a big difference over normal tap water. Secondly, $179? That is way too much for something to try.

Google is lobbying for Nevada to be the first state to have first self driving cars. Two bills are being introduced as Google says that over 14,000 miles have been tested on California roads. Google says more than 1000 miles have been driven autonomously without any human interaction but is definitely still in a testing phase.

This would be a huge breakthrough if it passes. We are still pretty far from seeing automated driving cars take over the streets but it would be awesome to see the development begin. Having self driving cars would prevent a lot more accidents as it would be safer and save gas as the cars are driven more fuel efficiently.

via New York Times and VentureBeat

Check out some of the pictures on Inhabitat of the carbon neutral city, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Theres some more here as well. This city is planned to house 40,000 residents and hundreds of businesses and will house state of the art clean technologies and architecture. This place probably cost a fortune to build out so it is no surprise that it is located in the UAE.

Masdar

if anyone is looking for a green photographer, check out alexhophotography.com, specializing in  weddings, maternity/newborn, family portraits, and fashion/glamour.

This is a pretty neat video showing how one of Google’s datacenter works. I like how they have their own hard drive destruction tools to destroy the data on the hard drives as well as their own machines to crush hard drives into pieces.

via Gizmodo