Saul Griffith has just released WattzOn, a personal footprint calculator that allows you to account for everything in your life – including taxes and the embodied energy of the products you own. You can then compare your impact with other people in the world and start to understand how much alternative energy is needed to […]
Category Archives: environment
watts up
Also posted in blogogracy, customization, energy, materials, possessed products, visualization
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wash me please
The Greenwashing Index is a mashup of advertisements submitted by users and ranked on how much they lie about the sustainability of products. Watching ads through a critical lens has a very different impact than their broadcasting on television or in print; the only problem is that they tend to disappear from the web once […]
Also posted in blogogracy, energy, marketing
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farm map 2
With the growing interest in eating local and community-supported agriculture there is a real demand for enabling technology to let small producers and community markets advertise their ever-changing menu. Otoyk (Kyoto backwards) is the newest entry in this field; it allows users to submit links to community farms and markets, and visitors can find directions […]
Also posted in blogogracy, conviviality, energy, food, futurecraft, marketing, supply chain
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chip chop shops
Hiroshi pointed me to this BusinessWeek investigation on microchip counterfeiting, which explains how electronic waste recycling is profitable: used circuit boards are baked over coal fires to loosen precious microchips. These are rinsed in the local river and sorted according to manufacturer. The chips can be re-sold as is, or their markings can be sanded […]
Also posted in fabrication, materials, supply chain, traceability, upcycling
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material extinction
Earth’s Natural Wealth: an Audit explores the depletion of exotic materials necessary for manufacturing high-tech products through a series of intense infographics. The lesson is that some of our most desirable elements (Indium for LCD screens, Gallium for lasers and LEDs) are set to become completely extinct with ten or twenty years with no substitute […]
Also posted in fabrication, materials, supply chain, upcycling, visualization
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lap sack
HP announced it would start shipping laptops in reusable cloth bags instead of the usual cardboard boxes, a step toward reducing materials that have nowhere to go but away. via
Also posted in energy, fabrication, futurecraft, materials, product design, soft/glowing, supply chain
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construction costs
Gavin Lee‘s workshop group at Nightmarket ’08 produced a Flash game highlighting the social costs of destruction. Using a Wii remote, users can drive a bulldozer through a landscape, knocking down trees and houses amid satisfying sounds of demolition. After the frenzied destruction, you are awarded points based on the number of displaced people and […]
Also posted in art, conviviality, marketing
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black tin 2
Tin Mining In Bangka Island – Click here for this week’s top video clips I’ve talked about the devastation that illegal tin mining has wrought on the island of Bangka (Indonesia), and while preparing my talk for the Nightmarket 2008 workshop I came across this video which gives us a glimpse into the squalid conditions […]
Also posted in conviviality, fabrication, materials, supply chain
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