SalvaEco

I've covered several solar gadgets here on GO, but it's important to promote the value of some kinetic energy-based products as well. One such cool device that I found while stumbling the green web is the Eco LED Flashlight.

Instead of having the shakes to produce energy (like most other eco-friendly lights out there) this product uses a zip cord. Simply pull the cord for about a minute — and voila! — you've got enough light for nearly half an hour. Pull longer, and that time limit goes up and up — to almost 45 minutes. Thankfully, the flashlight also comes with a car charger so your savings in batteries don't go towards physical therapy for your arm. Powering directly will yield you almost 3.5 hours of use. Did I mention it has a swivel head?

The good times don't stop there. Not only can all that physical exertion give you enough light to reenact The Blair Witch Project, but the power stored can also charge up any number of devices. The Eco LED comes with several adapters for PDAs, cell phones, and a host of other electronics. The 5 LEDs will last roughly 50,000 hours, so expect this flashlight to help you out where others have let you down.

For piece of mind in your glove box, boat, camping gear, or home, I'm not sure you can go wrong with this gadget. For $29.95, "zip" on over and pick one up!

Filed under: Biodiesel, Ethanol, Legislation and Policy

Whereas some European countries like Germany and Sweden are long-time fans of biofuels, southern European countries seem to need a little more help.

Portugal has announced a new tax exemption for national producers to help them being a strong player in the biofuel market. There are no Portuguese companies currently producing ethanol, most of it being imported from Brazil. In order to compete with cheaper sugarcane-produced ethanol, the Portuguese government has announced tax exemptions for corn producers to manufacture bioethanol. Galp, the biggest retailer of oil products in the country has announced that it can only sell Portuguese ethanol if the price is competitive against Brazilian. It sounds like a known story, doesn’t it? Galp is also planning to sell 100 billion tonnes (metric) of biodiesel in 2008 made from imported Brazilian or Angolan soyabeans. Plans are to reach 200 billion tonnes in 2009.

Portugal’s neighbor, Spain, is wishing to use more biofuels. Currently, the country is living a weird situation: demand of diesel is so high (currently 70 percent of the car sales are of diesels) that the country is exporting gasoline and importing diesel. Therefore the Government has plans to switch some of that demand to biodiesel, although 75 percent of raw materials should be imported. Current government plans wish for at least 5.75 percent of biofuels in 2010 and 20 percent in 2010. However, the Association of oil products operators of Spain has just claimed for some flexibility in the dates and the percentages. First, they want the power to decide if it should be biodiesel or bioethanol and then they claim for some flexibility in the dates.

Spain is planning to plant up to 400,000 ha (almost 1 million acres) to produce bioethanol, currently almost non-existent at Spanish gas stations. You can check availability and prices for all fuels in Spain by clicking this link.

[Source: Portuguese Ministry of Agriculture and Europapress via Econoticias.com]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Filed under: Emerging Technologies, Green Culture

If you inflate a balloon and place it on a little toy car frame and then release it, it will race across the room until the balloon deflates. That is essentially the idea of engineer Guy Negre of MDI in . Popular Science magazine reports he is working with an Indian company to put about 6000 Air Cars on Indian streets by August 2008.

In case you’ve missed the previous stories (see below), Mr. Negre is using a piston-type engine to extract the stored energy in the compressed air to drive the wheels. This makes elegant sense. Why do we combust air with fuel in an engine? To get high pressure, of course! Compressed air at 4350 psi is powerful! And it takes energy to raise air to that pressure level with is actually 290 bar (290 times higher) than atmospheric pressure. Stored gas pressure is like stored energy in a battery. You put it in at one time, and you take it out later. Gasoline and diesel engines put energy in (the fuel) and take it out at the same time.

Compressing air to 290 bar is a relatively straightforward task. Take a reciprocal compressor, power it up, fill the Air Car’s tanks in a few minutes, and then drive away. That takes energy, probably electric energy, to get that done. Petroleum use can be avoided but electric use is still needed. The car will even come with it’s own on-board compressor. Refilling that way should take about 4 hours.

The range of the vehicle is said to be 125 miles and it has a top speed of 68 mph. I haven’t gone through the thermodynamics of the full process but I gotta admit this is a pretty nifty way of circumventing petroleum use. If the compressor is green-powered (solar, water, wind, etc.), the Air Car will be too. And vice versa.

Related:

• A new agreement between Tata Motors and MDI bring the air-car closer to reality
• India’s Tata Motors and France’s MDI sign agreement to build compressed air-powered cars
• Old video of air-powered car making the rounds at YouTube

[Source: Popular Science, MDI]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Image source: WikiMedia Commons: Photographer: Dider Gentilhomme

Editor's note: Fair Trade is a topic that GreenOptions.com has been covering for some time now, so we thought it might be interesting to debate from the progressive vs. conservative perspective. Brady and Alicia offer us some excellent background on the discussion. Now, it's Jimmy and Shirley's turn…

Jimmy: Although I am generally conservative on fiscal matters and would normally lean toward unfettered free trade, I understand the importance of Fair Trade to our country’s interest and as a humanitarian influence on the world. Fair Trade levels the playing field. Where we have certain standards for the treatment of our workers and environmental restrictions, while other countries do not; therefore, they have a competitive advantage. In circumstances where slave and prison labor is used to compete with American labor the need for Fair Trade standards is obvious. But what about circumstances where the cost of living in undeveloped countries is simply so much lower that this allows the country to clobber the US with low cost labor?

Free trade would seem only fair given willing workers and willing employers. Also many of our increasingly stringent environmental standards are a testimony of our wealth. Although basic health and sanitation standards are a must, do we hold other developing countries to the high environmental standards that only our wealth can support?

These are important questions that we will consider. Please add your thoughts as well so that we can determine what might be the best form of Fair Trade policy to live and support.

Carried up by 40 horses and assembled by a team of international volunteers, it’s a replica of Noah’s Ark on the mountain where some say it came to rest. From the construction team’s weblog: “Our aim is to remind the world leaders and public that there’s not much time left to mitigate a climate disaster with devastating consequences for all.”

This photo was taken on the 23rd. I’m told that the Ark is almost now almost finished.

Today, 14 activists also reached the summit, 5,137 metres above sea level, where they unfurled a banner reading, “G8: this is the point of no return. Save the climate now”. Beate Steffens, one of the summit team, said, “If these leaders don’t act now, we will very soon reach a point where climate change gets out of control”.

Continue reading Ark on Mt. Ararat…

The Rainbow Warrior is currently on a three-month expedition in the Mediterranean, calling for the creation of marine reserves in the region, as part of a global network of protected areas covering 40% of our seas and oceans.

Sebastian Losada filed this report:

The bluefin tuna season doesn’t seem to have started yet in the waters that extend off the Libyan coasts. Some catches have already taken place, yes, but just a few compared to the levels we will possibly witness in the coming weeks. Two-hundred purse seiners will try to take as much tuna as they can from the Libyan fishing ground before the fishery is closed on July the 1st. That’s why they come to these waters: the last refuge in which an important subpopulation of bluefin tuna still survives.

Continue reading Of tuna and turtles…

Most of the time when we think of Fair Trade products, we think of supporting small farmers outside the US who struggle to earn livable wages and to receive adequate payment for their goods. But a coalition of farmers in the Midwest wants to encourage the same kind of committed support we give to imported Fair Trade products for goods farmed domestically. Wholesome Harvest raises organic meat on a network of forty farms throughout the Midwest and sells it in supermarkets (and online) through processors who’ve been approved by their members. The goal is to provide absolute traceability, transparency and access to backstory for their customers — a particularly important set of values in the meat industry, where bacterial contamination is more common than in produce, and often can’t be traced to the source due to complex networks of national and international distribution. The health threat this poses has been presented recently as a real threat to national security; but even when outbreaks effect only a small population, it’s critical to be able to identify and eliminate the problem quickly. In addition to farming, Wholesome Harvest has a strong ongoing activist effort, engaging concerned citizens like themselves to try to… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Food and Farming at 7:16 PM)

Filed under: Podcasts

Sharing a bit of auto design wisdom with us on the latest AutoblogGreen podcast is Roberto Jerez, who gives us the skinny on Velozzi and their 200 mpg entry for the Auto X Prize. Plus, the highlights from recent news and we’re still grooving to our new theme music.

More on Velozzi here:

• Team Velozzi developing Automotive X-Prize competitor

SUBSCRIBE to the AutoblogGreen Podcast in iTunes
LISTEN to the show now
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Filed under: Emerging Technologies, Etc.

Ever hear the name Stan Meyer? About eight thousand conspiracy theorists just nodded their heads. Stan invented a water electrolyzer – nothing new there – however, according to Stan anyway, his actually works on demand. The above video (c. 1990) shows him driving a VW-powered dune buggy running on nothing but water. Peruse YouTube for related videos, and you’ll find he’s been actually pretty well documented, but surprisingly unpublicized.

His method of electrolysis breaks the H2 from the O into their respective gases, both which are then sent to the modified fuel injectors and combusted in a regular old ICE. The only exhaust is more water vapor, which can be left to the atmosphere, or recycled back into the system. Of course, as I said, there have been many people to make electrolyzers that do that very thing, but not in the copious quantities that Stan’s machine is said to.

When sifting through his notes and patent materials (.zip file available here), he apparently found the resonance frequency of water and tuned his electrolyzer with an oscillator to that frequency, vastly boosting the efficiency of the device, and making it an actually viable source of fuel, since you don’t have to put so much more energy into it than you’re getting out of it. No, this is not a free energy system, since energy from water is actually consumed, and water must be refilled, but the vastly more combustible gas produced nets much greater mpg of water than any means of burning gasoline.

Unfortunately, Mr. Meyer is no longer around to tell us about his invention – let alone sell us his proposed DIY kit for $1,500 – because he was poisoned. His brother, however, has continued his research to the best of his ability and posted Stan’s notes and patent info. Stan was not a trained scientist or engineer, so his notes use terms not accepted by the scientific or engineering community, and they can be hard to decipher. I’m sure that if you can make sense of his research, prove theories correct, and build a working prototype, the world as a whole would really appreciate it. Post your comments, findings, thoughts and discussions for all to hear.

[Source: Water Powered Car, YouTube]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD Step behind the curtain at Ford Motor. Experience the documentary first-hand.

Your garden doesn't have to suffer just because of water restrictions or drought problems. Collecting water that would otherwise go down the drain will make you and your plants happy.

• GO reader Georgie Mallett, who lives on the coast of Southern Georgia, washes her dishes (with eco-friendly dish soap) in a plastic dish pan, then waters her organic garden with it when finished.
• You can also keep a container in the shower to catch water while you're sudsing up (be sure to use enviro-friendly soap and shampoo).
• If you run the water and wait for it to get hot (or cold) don't let it go down the drain; instead, fill up a bucket or other containers.
• GO's Jimmy Hogan puts a bucket under the AC to catch the condensation drippings
• Collect rain water in a rain barrel. Connect hoses or pipes to rain barrels for easy garden watering. Rig two barrels together to catch the overflow.

What do you to make your water go farther? Let us know with a comment below.

Thanks to Georgie Mallett of St. Simons Island, Georgia for today's tip! Georgie wins two months of wind power from Renewable Choice Energy for the tip suggestion.

Got a tip for Amy and Rebecca? Suggest it here.