The Reclaim – Samsung and service partner Sprint’s newest green phone – has innovative features that go beyond the bare bones that similar products like Motorola’s W233 Renew phone offers. This eco-conscious smart-phone is 80 percent recyclable and made mostly of corn-based bio-plastics, but that’s not all this compact phone has up its green sleeves.
Imagine you’re lost in the woods, having wandered off the hiking trail. It’s looking like you may have to bed down on some pine needles with what’s left of the granola bars, when your friend whips out a little device that looks like a small fan. What’s that? It’s the K3 Charger – a compact hybrid wind-and-solar power generator about the size of a flashlight. The handy green gadget allows consumers to recharge an iPod, cell phone, PDA, or other electronic device using renewable energy!
Designer and inventor extraordinaire Knut Karlsen recently unveiled an inspired approach to portable power that can’t be beat for its elegant simplicity: a prototype battery capable of charging itself when exposed to sunshine. His slick set of SunCat C-cells are wrapped in flexible photovoltaic panels and will slowly recharge when left to bask in the sun – just like a cat.
Even if your local skyline isn’t hazy with smog, there are a number of environmental factors that impact your daily life but fly under the radar of your senses. Seeking to increase awareness and familiarity with environmental phenomena, Hernando Barragan has conceived of an Environmental Traffic Light that monitors and visualizes CO2 levels, air pressure, humidity and a host of other measurements. One of fifty top entries in this year’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition, these open-source eco outposts are sure to spark increased interest in the environmental factors that affect us all.
This year’s Greener Gadgets Competition is loaded with brilliant ideas. One of our favories is the Tweet-a-watt, a fabulous open-source, power monitoring project from ladyada. One part off-the-shelf hardware, two-parts hackware and a dash of environmental consciousness and social networking, Tweet-a-watt monitors and “tweets ” (publish wirelessly) your home’s daily energy use to your Twitter account, all for less than fifty bucks!
This year’s CES is showcasing some great green products, and we were particularly impressed by this new solar powered outdoor lamp by miniWIZ, who brought us the Hymini Portable Wind Charger. The Solarbulb is a brilliant solution that provides light while making use of old plastic bottles. Simply attach it to any ordinary bottle and the 0.18 W solar cells will provide up to 6 hours of continuous night lighting.
Energizer has worked hard to brand and market itself as the go-to battery for rechargeable reuse by offering many nifty little recharging gadgets to power up your AA and AAA batteries. At CES this week, Energizer debuted its latest green gadget, the Solar Battery Recharger. While we all love our Solios, if you wanted to charge batteries you still had to buy a battery charger that drains energy from the grid. This solar charger removes the step, allowing you to charge both AA and AAA batteries with renewable energy.
Green innovations are taking center stage at this year’s CES, with many big name companies embracing sustainable design. Motorola is doing their part to tackle the massive problem of consumer e-waste with the release of the world’s first carbon neutral cellphone. The Renew W233 is the first certified Carbonfree cell phone on the market and features a 100% recyclable housing made from recycled water bottles.
Umbrellas that light up with integrated LEDs are nothing new: from Instructable’s DIY illuminated umbrella to patio umbrellas available at Lowes, LED Umbrellas have been around the block. But here’s a brilliant idea we’ve never seen before: an illuminated umbrella that is powered by rain! Designer Sang-Kyun Park has taken the illuminated umbrella idea to the next level with Lightdrops, an umbrella made from polyvinylidene fluoride [PDVF], a conductive membrane that powers LEDs with energy from falling rain.
Every year we’re excited to see more and more exciting innovations in the clean tech industry, and happily many of these advancements are finally trickling down to greener consumer gadgets. From renewable mobile energy sources to greener materials and manufacturing, today’s gizmos are smarter, smaller, and more efficient than ever before. We’ve compiled a list of our favorite clean green devices that are sure to bring holiday cheer to the gadget geeks in your life.
Perfect for emergency preparedness and cute to boot, this adorable penguin eco flashlight would make an excellent addition to any home. The bright light eschews a landfill-bound battery for a pump powered kinetic charger that provides an hour of light for each minute spent pumping. Capable of …
Anyone who has ever spent an afternoon mowing lawns knows the downsides of the job: walking in monotonous straight lines with the filthy emissions of a two-stroke engine in their face, and a subway’s worth of noise to contend with. Enter Husqvarna’s Automower, a solar-powered, zero-emission lawn-Roomba that offers an attractive (albeit pricy) replacement.
For those times when you are hanging out in your underground lair with no sunlight to speak of, this little device could power your iPhone should the battery die. The iYo Induction Power Charger, designed by Swedish industrial designer Peter Huvander, is a yo-yo that utilizes magnetic induction to generate and store energy as it spins. Give it a few whirls, and then simply plug in your iphone for a charge!
We love our kinetic energy here at Inhabitat, and we are excited to announce inventive use of human kinetic power: The brandnew 2 GB Eco Media Player is hand-crank portable media player can play music, video, and even charge your cellphone, all from a few seconds of cranking! What’s more renewable than human power? We love that someone finally had the brilliant idea to mix renewable energy generation with music & video – all the best things in life in one cute little package.
If you thought rechargeable batteries were a good green idea, the USBCELL rechargeable battery will blow your mind- it plugs into any computer’s USB port to recharge. It’s a standard AA battery which will fit into all your every day uses. We’re not the only ones amped up about USBCELL- today at CEBIT, the green battery was awarded a Gold award at the IF Product Design ceremony. Produced by Moixa Energy, has a flip cap top that houses the USB port, and can be used like any regular AA battery. Not to mention, it cuts back on the nearly 15 billion Alkaline batteries made and thrown away each year.
What’s a more renewable form of energy than human energy? We’ve seen it before with the human-powered gyms in Hong Kong, and here’s a portable energy source that’s powered by the spring in your step. We just discovered this amazingly useful gadget at CES, and can’t wait to get our hands on one. The Weza Portable Energy Source from Freeplay can produce enough power from a few footpumps to jump-start a boat or automobile battery and power a laptop, light or a variety of other electronics. If you were stuck out in the middle of nowhere, you could even use to charge your cellphone!
Hi-Tech Wealth, Inc., a telecommunications supplier in China has unveiled the world’s first commercial solar-powered cellular phone. The S116 retails in China around $510 and is packed with features including a microSD memory card slot, MP3 player and a 1.3 megapixel camera. The phone’s battery lasts 2.5 times longer than a traditional battery and can be recharged outdoors, indoors, even by candle light! Just one hour of direct sunlight will provide enough juice to power 40 minutes of talk-time.
This little wind-powered toy brings clean, green energy to the palm of your hand, and is a great little gadget for getting youngsters interested in the beauty of renewable energy. No batteries or charging or nothing – instead just blow on the toy and watch it light up! The wind-powered toy has one green and two blue LED lights which are powered by blowing on the tiny 2.4-inch rotor blade. So you can forget using a lighter or cell phone during that ballad at your next rock concert— illuminate the night with the eco-friendly Blow Light!
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
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