Posts Tagged ‘Mp3 Players’
Dreaming of a Green Christmas: Eco-friendly Festivities
November 30th, 2008
It’s a time of togetherness, a time of cheer and a time of giving, but it’s easy to forget that Christmas is also a time of gluttony and waste. What with temporary decorations, discarded wrapping paper and unwanted gifts, a huge amount of waste ends up in landfill come January.
But there is a way to enjoy Christmas and at the same time maintain our responsibility to the environment and it doesn’t mean we’re reduced to giving each other lumps of coal in true Ebenezer Scrooge fashion.
Giving greener gifts is one of the best things we can do to make Christmas a little less wasteful. Environmentally friendly gifts have a two fold benefit; they’re less wasteful gifts in their own right, but they also help to spread the green gospel and encourage others to think about green issues too.
Eco-gadgets make great environmentally friendly gifts for the technophiles in your life. Solar gadgets are a particular favourite as they save money as well as reduce your carbon footprint, and are also extremely useful for times when you can’t plug into the mains. The Solio Charger for example, is a simple hand sized solar cell that can be hooked up to most small electrical items such as phones, cameras, and MP3 players.
For the nature lover, how about encouraging your local wildlife with a garden bat box, bug box, or bird feeder? Just make sure you fill it with fair trade nuts and seed!
Recycled gifts are also Green Christmas friendly. Beer guzzlers will appreciate goblets made from recycled beer bottles. Ladies can take pride in their purses made from Cambodian rice sacks, or how about the Choc-O Mini bag made in the Philippines by an award winning women’s cooperative?
With these recycled gifts, not only are you giving new life to waste that would otherwise be burnt, buried or simply litter the streets and waterways, you’re also helping to provide employment to an impoverished part of the world. But it’s not all charity – recycling can be chic too, and many celebrities have been featured in the glossy gossip magazines clutching their eco-bags which has helped to popularise these products.
So this year, instead of dreaming of a white Christmas – why not make it a Green Christmas?
Posted in 
Tags: 
Green White Light: Oled for Lighting Explained
July 27th, 2008
OLEDs are very power efficient and they can be made very thin. An OLED light bulb is actually a thin film of material that emits bright white light. Because OLEDs can be flexible, or even transparent, exciting new OLED lamp designs are possible.
OLEDs are also the most ‘green’ light source. Not only are they super efficient, but OLEDs do not contain any ‘bad’ metals such as mercury, which is present in efficient CFL lamps. So OLEDs are really the future lighting source, when all things are considered.
In April 2008, OSRAM has announced the world’s first OLED lamp. It was designed by lighting designer Ingo Maurer, uses 10 OLED light panels, sized 132 x 33 millimeters. The OLED bulb in this lamp are actually thin square sheets that emit light. This lamp is more of a prototype than a commercial product – only 25 will be made, and the price is more than 25,000euro. But it sure is an important milestone on the path for OLED lighting.
Several companies are working towards white OLED light products. GE is hoping to get products out by 2010, and OSRAM is planning products for 2011-12, even though, like we said, they already introduced their first OLED lamp in 2008.
Philips is already shipping product samples and OLED lighting kits, and is hoping to have commercial products as early as 2009. Other companies involved in white OLED lighting are Konica Minolta (plans to have products by 2011), Universal Display (WOLED technology), and Kodak.The EU is funding several OLED lighting projects, while in Japan a few companies have joined forces to create Lumiotec – a JV to study the possibilities of OLED light bulbs.
We’re yet to see which company (or companies) will win the race for OLED lighting. But we’re seeing more and more evidence that OLEDs will play an important role in our green-light future.
By: Ron Mertens
About the Author:
Ron Mertens has been following OLEDs since 1998, and is the editor of OLED-Info, the web’s leading OLED display information web site. OLED-Info is published by Metalgrass software, who provides shareware for AdSense publishers and several other web sites.
