Think James Bond meets Star Trek thrown in with a bit of Batman and you would be on the right road to imagining one of these super sleek sea-faring vessels. With an array of impressive technology, the company, Solar Sailor has come up with the first line in solar powered ships ranging from houseboats to huge tankers. Using what they describe as ‘Hybrid Marine Power’, which is energy generated by the sun and wind, these ‘Solar Ships’ produce 50% less emissions and zero pollution.
Jordan Sands, a High School student,
born in a rural area in the States was a dab hand around his family’s farm.
Helping out with harvest, he noticed that a lot of the left-over stuff from
crops gets thrown away. Parts of the crop such as, corn, wheat and flax are not
used. Jordan,
concerned about the amount of material going to waste, devised a brilliant way
to turn waste crops into paper. Not only is this a great recycling project to
help the environment but it also provides farmers with an alternative source of
income.
A simple contraption but an ingenious idea, the Sun Oven looks like a huge, shiney metal dish. It catches and traps heat from the sun to cook food at the same temperatures as a normal oven. An ideal solution for rural communities in lesser developed countries where electricity is scarce, meals could be cooked for an entire village in one day for up to 1200 people. If it’s just dinner for a few family and friends, don’t worry, there are smaller models available. Easy to use with no danger of fire, the Sun Oven is a practical alternative to more environmentally harmful cooking appliances.
Have you ever worried about leaving your bike out on the pavement, chained to a tree or railings with nothing but a flimsy lock? This may be the solution and even if you don’t ride a bike you may want to take up cycling just for the novelty factor of watching your bike hanging upside down in the air. The Bike Tree – is as tree-like as a large plastic dome on a pillar can look. Talk about futuristic. It’s a bit like a multi-storey car park for bikes. These Bike Trees are designed to go on the street. You put your bike on a track and it gets whisked up into air and stacked with other bikes. When you want it back, you tap into the computer and the machine lowers your bike back down to the ground. Just make sure you’re not sitting on it. Get stuck in a Bike Tree and the Fire Brigade might not believe you.
It’s not the kind of thing you often think about – where do all the old tube carriages go? The tube graveyard? Once upon a time, old, forlorn tube carriages, covered in graffiti with chewing gum sticky seats lay abandoned in lonely train yards. The future looked bleak until one sunny day; a bright team of environmentalists from Uxbridge came along and decided they would transform these empty carriages into lovely offices. If you think about the size of a tube carriage, it’s perfect for a live or work space. London Underground applauded the idea and sections of the Jubilee line lived happily ever after.
http://www.tubelines.com/news/releases/200608/20060803a.aspx
We want you to get stuck in with the environment, get your hands dirty but this may be taking things a little too far - paper made out of sheep poo. Yuck! I hear you cry, but let it be said, when it comes to recycling, anything goes. Yes, it would have to be a farm in Wales that has come up with this novel idea. I don’t know what you think but the wedding invitations are definitely the icing on the cake. Check out the website and see how you can make your own paper – the mind boggles!
Who would have thought that simply by walking down the street you could generate electricity? Vibrations! On a daily basis the vibrations caused by pedestrians, cars, trains and lorries go completely unnoticed but not for a team of British Engineers who have their ear to the ground. They have come up with a way of converting street vibrations into electricity. "We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground," says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. With generators built into the ground to measure the vibrations, you can happily stomp down the road knowing that every time your foot hits the pavement, you could be potentially supplying the electricity to power someone’s toaster.
It’s not Santa Claus stuck in your chimney but a large balloon. A chimney is always guaranteed to suck the heating out of any room. Pushing up the cost of the heating bills and wasting energy in the home, shoving newspaper up your chimney no longer needs to be the solution. Simple but very effective, the Chimney Balloon inflates inside the flue and blocks the gap so cold air can’t come rushing into your living room and send you running to fetch last year’s Christmas present - attractive, woolly slippers.
Incorporating and adapting existing technology for areas of the world where money and resources are scarce, is a brilliant way to make a significant difference in the lives of those who live in poverty. This is one of those ideas – you simply take a bike that is connected to generator, which is wired to a battery and you pedal. Pedaling for fifteen minutes generates one hour of electricity for a computer. A non-profit company called Inveneo, has set up a system to install these electricity making bikes in several villages in Uganda, which has enabled communities to significantly improve trade and business prospects.
Hopefully without the hairy feet and the battle of good over evil, these environmentally friendly houses could be a viable possibility for ’green living’. A project in Norfolk has designed and built these earth-covered dwellings to show how much energy and money could be saved. The houses can maintain a temperature of 22 degrees all year round so no need for central heating. They are covered in plants so they don’t look out of place with their countryside surroundings but having Bilbo Baggins as your neighbor might cause a few heads to turn.
Don’t upgrade your mobile, plant it! With over 50 million mobile phones in the UK and the enticing offers for upgrades, millions of mobile phones are thrown away every year. Disposal of these obsolete phones is a massive environmental problem so scientists have come up with the first biodegradable mobile phone.
The Elephant Pump was cleverly adapted from a 2000 year old Chinese design. Intended for communities in lesser developed countries where water and resources are in low supply and water contamination is a life threatening risk, the Elephant Pump is based on a well system that draws water up out of the ground using plastic washers attached to a piece of rope. It can produce a litre of clean water a second for a well that is an average of 20 metres deep.
This year marks the launch of a new satellite to monitor global warming and end the ongoing dispute amongst the world’s environmental science community as to how fast the polar ice caps are actually melting. Taking a whole host of state of the art technology, the purpose of this satellite will be to monitor how glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets are affected by climate change. The satellite will also have the unique capacity to document the rise in sea levels as a result of the melting ice.
Developed by a pioneer group of women in Central America, The Maya Nut Program has won environmental awards. They have found a way to use the Maya Nut to produce a delicious, nutritious drink. Traditionally used in times of food shortage, this once unpopular type of nut was found to be very high in Fiber, Vitamin C, E, A, B, Calcium, Iron, Zinc and Protein. By utilizing existing resources, this is a self-sufficient, environmentally friendly scheme that has united a community.
Climate Change is destroying the Arctic. The glaciers on Svalbard, where you will go if you wow the Judges with your amazing idea, will have disappeared in 100 years.
Greenpeace International has developed an Award Winning refrigerator, not for smoothies and ice-cream, but to enable vaccines to be stored in areas of the world without an adequate electricity supply. It operates on Solar Energy and is 'a clean, safe lifesaving initiative' says Wolfgang Lohbeck of Greenpeace, Germany. Many regions of the world, including the Arctic, have non-existent, inadequate or intermittent electricity supplies and so cannot provide constant refrigeration. Solar Chill is also applicable for emergency relief in natural or human made disaster zones. It also has the following benefits:
- SolarChill technology does not use any Ozone depleting or potent substances, which cause climate change
- SolarChill technology is more reliable, safer and cleaner than kerosene refrigerators
