Greenmonk: the blog

Another great spot from our pals at GreenBang.

Earlier this week at our EnergyCamp unconference we were talking about chargers for laptops and mobile phones. You know they keep consuming electricity when they are not plugged into the device, right? If not please unplug them when not in use. Its a small thing that will cut your electricity bill.

David Berlind said: “wouldn’t it be great if you could get a charger that switched itself off when your laptop was fully charged?” Great idea David! Well it seems Nokia at least is way ahead of us.

Well done Nokia for innovating in this area. Now a request - please stop screwing us with proprietary power inputs. Its not even remotely funny that my N95 has a USB port for data and a separate pin for power. In order to cut waste in raw materials (namely metals) the Chinese government has mandated standard USB ports for data and power. You want to do business in China, right? Well please fix your manufacturing processes, and cut your addiction to revenues from proprietary power interfaces. USB power for the win.

From an innovation standpoint you’re hurting yourself with the addiction to these high margin cables. Compare with the iPhone. Power is not the only lifeblood - so is data. When you plug an iPhone into a Mac or PC it synchronises data, and charges the phone. If Nokia wants to encourage a similar synchronicity it should go with the standard. Energy and Data are both lifebloods.

Give it two years and iPhones will be 50 quid. What then? Start the fightback- make synchronisation more natural. And you’ll have an advantage if you make the plug a self turn off model.

This might seem a little circular but i would just like to thank Dan from Greenbang for his kind words about our unconference on Monday.

It seems to Greenbang that holding an energy-saving conference in Las Vegas is quite a funny thing to do. But if you are going to hold a global conference, why not do it in front of some show girls. You just get much more out of your meetings than you would with video conferencing. Energy Camp is a meet-up dedicated to the reduction of information technology’s global carbon footprint.

Actually though Energy Camp is about reducing energy footprints across all of our activities, not just those that are IT-related. Keynote speaker Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s new sustainability czar takes a widescreen view- which is one reason I am so excited about the show. For him IT is only 3% of the problem…

Thanks to LaserGuided for the awesome picture of Vegas at night, under creativecommons Attribution 2.0 license.

This is kind of pathetic. One luxury car company sues another. Who cares? This news has nothing to do with sustainability. My partners at Re*Move might disagree - they have been big Tesla fans. But from a Greenmonk perspective arguments about IP like this are so last 20th century. Compete on the basis of implementation people. Lower barriers to participation. And besides if you want a muscle car maybe you should buy an Alfa or buy a Pontiac and forget about the planet for a bit. If you want sustainability just drive slower.

Are you familiar with No Impact Man? Its a cool experiment.

In specific terms, the challenge is to take a year to develop and live a no impact lifestyle. Our approach will be to research our ecological options and run down our damage in one area at a time—solid waste, transportation, energy, for example. Our aim, over the course of the year, is to do no net harm to the environment. We’ll wind down in stages.

But to cause no net impact is impossible to do merely by restricting consumption and waste output. Just participating in society makes us responsible for the negative environmental impacts of society’s functioning, even if our personal lifestyle does no harm. To offset our societal ecological debt, we also plan to take actions that will have positive environmental impact. For example, we’ll volunteer with the Nature Conservancy to clean up garbage off the beach. To help sop up our share of the year’s CO₂, we will take part in a reforestation project to help plant trees.

Then there is The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption.

The problem with being off consumption is that you can no longer buy a ‘treat’ for yourself in order to snap out of a bad mood. Being off consumption means no comfort food, no self-gifting, no temporary postponement of pain by the rush of adrenalin triggered off by that perfect purchase.

But I knew that when I went off consumption. I knew that, to resist the temptation to buy, I’ll basically need to be happy all the time. I also knew that I’ll face my first big test as soon as I hit a bad day

I have written before about the Intel-powered central heating. But how about a POWER-heated pool? From Techworld comes a cool story Datacentre used to heat swimming pool. IBM did the design work in conjunction with a company called GIB-Services. Who says you can’t have luxury and sustainability?

The pool is being closed temporarily for repairs this summer, at which time the heat transfer system will be put in place, says GIB-Services CEO Hans-Rudolf Scharer.

“It isn’t so complicated,” Scharer says, explaining that water is used to transfer the heat. “We pump hot water to the swimming pool.”

Excess heat generated by datacentre computers is collected in a storage area, where it heats up water that is piped to a heat exchanger at the pool facility. There, the heated water raises the temperature of the pool water. The process repeats itself as often as necessary with the heat exchanger, true to its name, exchanging heat from one part of the water to another.

Finally - another Techworld story. This time based on a survey from Bell Micro. I am not so into the UK companies aren’t ready to green yet angle (tell me something I don’t know), but one finding quoted in the story really jumped out at me because of its grassroots up implications.

While 84 percent of businesses took green issues seriously, half said employees rather than chief executives were driving the change. 

If employees are driving the agenda, its far less likely to be simple green-washing or tick list filling. Go concerned employee people!