Getting Green Off The Grid

Since the town was destroyed, it makes sense to start over in a more efficient way.
Greensburg, Kansas: Extraordinary Transformation : TreeHugger

Imagine a community for 1500 people designed as a state of the art working model for green building and energy, hybrid design efficiency and genuine intelligent design. A community that generates revenue by producing excess […]

Simple, helps keep garbage where it belongs, uses less garbage bags, and gives people an incentive to throw things away by watching this thing operate. Eventually the novelty would wear off, but it would take a long time to get everywhere.
BigBelly Solar Trash Receptacle : The Alternative Consumer

The BigBelly is a self-powered compacting trash […]

Hopefully they can make this work in the near future.
New Ways to Store Solar Energy for Nighttime and Cloudy Days

The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer’s battery store about the same amount […]

I have kept groceries on the porch in the winter to save on electric bills, or if the refrigerator was broken. This seems like a much better way to do it.
Freeaire.com Home Page

In colder climates, the Freeaire taps into the greatest source of refrigeration ever created: winter. The Freeaire can use cold outside air […]

This is much better than the usual style-before-substance approach they usually take.
Record Houses 2008 | Architectural Record

For more than 50 years, RECORD has presented an annual collection of projects from around the globe that represent exemplary residential design. For our 2008 Record Houses awards program, we took a new approach: we looked for built, single-family […]

Energy companies will run into this, as people demand more power and yet insist on green energy. It’s unfortunate that people are paying lip service to energy conservation, and focusing more on the producers of energy being environmentally conscious, instead of doing more to reduce their own energy footprint.
Why build more power lines? […]

This is a great idea. I hope they smell good.
Just Soap - Bicycle Blender

Here’s how it works: The bicycle drives a belt that turns a blade in a large stainless steel vat, where we stir together the purest ingredients - saponified olive, coconut and palm oils, essential oils, and organic herbs and spices. […]

I’m suspicious of the “all kinds of liquid fuel” comment, but this would be wonderful in densely populated areas.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Five-seat concept car runs on air

The OneCAT will be a five-seater with a glass fibre body, weighing just 350kg and could cost just over £2,500.
It will be driven by compressed air stored […]

I wonder if these can be combined with solar roof panels.
Discovery News : Discovery Channel

Researchers have developed a technique that harvests energy from rain showers and converts it into electricity. The technology could work in industrial air conditioning systems, where water condenses and drops like rain.
It could also be used in combination with solar power […]

I hope it doesn’t leak.
cape schank house, paul morgan architects at materialicious

Within the living room the ceiling wraps down to an internal water tank. The tank cools the ambient air temperature of the living room during summer, supplies rain water, and structurally carries the roof load.