The novelty of it is that the trees will be grown in the shape desired – like the ultimate topiary, only useful. Researchers from Tel Aviv University and the company Plantware are partnering up to grow structures from trees on a commercial scale – structures including bus shelters, playgrounds, and even houses.

There are already aeroponics pilot projects happening in the US, Australia and Israel, through which trees are grown in the air so that they have shapeable “soft roots.” The project hopes to take the technology to bigger-than-a-bread-box levels, creating sustainable, eco-friendly structures.

It’ll take awhile to see the new technology in action, since trees take awhile to grow, but we will indeed start seeing a few structures like park benches, gates, streetlamps and so forth grown out of trees.

Via physorg; photo via Plantware

Old cars that run on gas aren’t going away soon, and it’ll take a fair sized paradigm shift to get most people to convert their gas-powered cars into something that runs on anything else, or even convert them to hybrids. So technology that can make gasoline from a renewable resource is pretty dang handy for the time between now and when the last gas-powered car goes into a museum or Jay Leno’s garage.

We’ve seen the potential of gasoline from algae, but there is also a push to turn trash into gas – a concept that has many appeal factors. Byogy, out of Bakersfield, CA, is claiming its process converts trash, manure (both animal and human), landscaping wastes, and other food wastes into high-grade, 95 octane gasoline at a production cost of only $1.20-$2.00 per gallon.

The process and company have yet to prove themselves, and a facility won’t be online until two years from now. But Byogy hopes that by 2022, it can fill 2% of the nation’s gas tanks. If the technology is successful, I suspect that a larger percentage than that will be obtained by several companies picking through waste sites – a very happy image.

In theory, this “biofuel” is as ECO of Byogy Daniel L Rudnick says, “the Holy Grail of all biofuels” – but I hesitate to call it that just yet, considering we haven’t really seen results.

While gasoline simply isn’t a perfect option for our energy needs, this new tech is definitely an exciting prospect and, in keeping with reality, we need a sustainable alternative to gasoline that the masses can use while our nation, and the world, shifts mindsets to realize that gas-powered vehicles are so last season.

Via TreeHugger; photo via blueisbest

Intel Developer Forum was held last week, and featured cool new details about Nehalem, a more power-efficient chip architecture from the company.

Intel has been working on a design that will be able to help servers, laptops and desktops run far faster without requiring more energy to keep up the pace. One of the features that make the chip work more power-efficiently is a power-saving control unit on the chip that keeps tabs on the workload of the chips’ data-processing units. Inactive units are shut down until needed, helping to save energy. In addition, transistors shut off when not in use, an obvious but difficult step to make in design.

All of this is good news for gamers, since the higher-end desktops will be able to render 3-D animation twice as fast as what is possible today, and it is good news for everyone in general since it will help alleviate bottleneck issues around bandwidth -- and most importantly, it will be energy efficient.

There's a podcast up about the Nehalem, or you can read the whitepaper, view the keynote speeches, etc.

It’ll be great to soon have faster computers that don’t suck up tons of energy to do all the cool stuff we want them to do.

Via technologyreview

Biodegradable plastic made from renewable resources always sounds better than petroleum-based plastics, right? Well, kind of. We know that most bioplastics aren’t biodegradable in the sense that you can toss it in a compost bin and expect it to quickly disintegrate. Bioplastics still often have to go through an energy-intensive recycling process to get them to fully degrade. So, does this make them equally undesirable? Exactly how do they measure up to conventional plastics?

A new study by researchers at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu aimed to find out, and they discovered a few leg-ups that bioplastics have over conventional plastics during the production phase, primarily that bioplastics emit fewer carbon emissions when manufactured.

The researchers analyzed PHA, which is created by bacteria growing on corn-based sugar. They looked at every aspect of where CO2 could be emitted, from chemicals, fertilizers, fuels, fermentation… everywhere. They found that for each pound of plastic created, only .49 pounds of CO2 was emitted, versus 2-3 pounds of CO2 per pound of conventional plastic.

Another type of bio-plastic, PLA made by NatureWorks, LLC, only produced .27 pounds of CO2 per pound of plastic. This is because the most CO2 intensive parts of the process is the fermentation and electricity use, so the company came up with a better way of producing the plastic, which reduced the emissions further.

Considering that bio-plastics produce so much less CO2 than conventional plastics in the production phase, it seems likely that it would be an over-all better solution, right? Well, it gets complicated, especially when trying to compare apples to apples, and there are dozens of ways to look at the situation. For instance, what is the total carbon emission of petroleum-based plastic from manufacture, to recycle, to new product, versus manufacture to landfill – and how does that compare to the same lifecycle of bioplastic? And what percentage of bioplastic is actually being recycled compared to the percentage of conventional plastic being recycled, and how do those ratios stand up to one another? It gets sticky really quickly when trying to figure out exactly how much of an improvement bioplastic is over conventional plastic and where further improvements need to be made. Researchers are still working on data gathering, especially as new production methods emerge such as actually growing plastic.

But there are some major points that put bioplastics in the lime light. They’re made from renewable resources, and possibly waste products from ethanol production, versus the non-renewable resource of oil. They’re biodegradable in at least some sense, where conventional plastic is not.

But bioplastics still have some major issues that need to be sorted out, such as the energy required to break down the plastics, what happens to them when they end up in landfills rather than recycling plants, the fact that there aren’t many facilities that will accept them for recycling... Yet, with all the research being done and the demand for eco-friendly plastic options, it seems likely that these issues can, and will, be worked out fairly soon, and hopefully petroleum-based plastics will be a thing of our troubled past.

Desktop PCs are getting tiny, but Shuttle is putting out one of the smallest I’ve seen around. Just 10” long x 7” wide x less than 3” tall, the X27 mini-PC uses a proportionately tiny amount of energy. It consumes just 36 watts when active and 23 when idle, compared to the 70-250 watts regular-sized desktops use. So it is like having a laptop without the keyboard, mouse, or monitor. It will use Intel’s Atom low-power chip, and runs nearly inaudibly.

The new model will be shown off at the consumer electronics show IFA in Berlin, which starts Friday, and we might hear word about pricing after that. This could be competition with Dell’s (way, way cooler looking) new Studio Hybrid, though we don’t know the EPEAT status on the Shuttle X27 yet.

Via GoodCleanTech

Masdar has broken ground in its first solar panel factory, a $230 million thin-film plant in Ichtershusen, Germany that is part of the company’s $2 billion investment in thin-film production.

The factory will make panels of amorphous silicon on equipment from Santa Clara, CA’s Applied Materials, so the project will somewhat span the globe. Applied Materials’ equipment will also appear in Masdar City (pictured above) at its 140 MW factory, which will be up and running towards the end of 2010.

The German-based factory will open towards the end of next year, and will be able to produce 70 MWs worth of panels each year. This will be just the start of Masdar’s solar panel production. The company plans to hit 1 GW of annual production by 2014.

Via Nanotechnology Now

Dell’s new Studio Hybrid has received EPEAT Gold, which means the desktop meets all 23 required criteria, plus at least 75% of the optional criteria listed by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool. The Studio Hybrid is a cool, tiny desktop – about 80% smaller than standard desktops – and it uses about 70% less energy. What little energy it does use is used efficiently, meeting Energy Star 4.0 with its 87% efficient power supply. That adds up to some great savings on electricity over time.

The greenness goes beyond the desktop itself, since the packaging uses 95% recyclable materials, and you can send the machine back to Dell for free recycling using a kit that comes with the system. It’s great to see manufacturers making it so easy for users to complete the loop on their electronics.

And to top it all off, the Studio Hybrid just looks cool – certainly better than the HP or Lenovo Gold-winning desktop PCs. So sleek, you get to pick your favorite color, and it doesn’t take up much space at all. You can pair it up with Lenovo’s EPEAT Gold-winning monitor. Plus it has up to 4 GB RAM and up to 320 GB hard drive. Nice. The downside? One word: Vista.

I have a thing for all-in-one gadgets. I admit that the more I can consolidate must-haves into one item, the happier I am – from my printer-fax-scanner-copier to my phone-palm-alarm-mp3-player-does-everything-but-cooks-dinner, I like being able to do everything without having a bunch of stuff surrounding me. So this Media Street eMotion Solar Powered Media Player and Charger looks appealing as a media device.

Priced at just $169, this gadget is a photo album, music player, game player, eReader and charger. It plays ROMs, MP3s, MPEG4s, and charges lithium battery-powered gadgets while it’s at it. It only holds 2GB, but the fact that it is solar powered forgives the relatively small memory capacity. And it is far more practical than the James Bond-ish Pen Camera.

But, surprisingly, the specs on the solar power capabilities aren’t readily available, even at Media Street’s website, which makes me think the solar charger part is one of the weaker elements. Doesn’t that just figure… But it is probably better than wind-up toys.

Via CrunchGear

Japan is no stranger to figuring out eco-friendly commuter methods, but they’ve come up with something that could be very neat. A test line is going up this October in Japan for the Eco Ride, a commuter train that uses the same principles as a roller coaster to get its passengers from stop to stop.

Basically, drive units are installed at points along the railway that will pull the cars up so that the Eco Ride can get the potential energy needed to run. The strategy reduces the size of the railroad, structures and stations, as well as the need for drive units on each car, and so the line can be built along the medians of expressways and sidewalks for a pretty low price.

The cars can pull up to 2,500 passengers each hour at a rate of about 20-30 km/h, and uses half the energy needed to run trains and a third of that needed to run busses. Sounds pretty great, but the test line will figure out if it is marketable. Considering the crazy-yet-cool stuff coming out of Japan, the novelty of it will probably find an audience.

Via GoodCleanTech

There are a lot of ways to get electronic books, like NetLibrary, Kindle, and so forth. But the titles are often limited. EcoBrain is onto this issue, and is providing an eco-sensitive way to get eco-educated.

They’ve started an online book store on environmental studies that is totally paperless. The main goal of the company is to reduce the environmental impact of reading. Going paperless is a sure-fire way to do that.

Readers can choose from hundreds of books in different areas, from environmental studies to fiction, from memoirs to day hikes, from green building to gardening, from renewable energy to kids books. While there are hundreds of titles, it’s a bit of a bummer that it is so niche. But a whole lot of other sites have the ebook thing covered, so niche marketing works in this case.

The company is only a year old, and more titles are rapidly being added to the library. The downloaded formats work with Adobe Reader, Palm Reader or Microsoft Reader, and there is also a selection of audiobooks in MP3 format. So if you’re running out of green reading material, can’t find many eco-titles at NetLibrary, or haven’t yet gotten your hands on a Kindle, EcoBrain is worth a look-see.

Via Ecolocalizer

We have a lot of fun with online maps here at EcoGeek. We like watching clean tech companies pop up on the radar, and organizing vacations with green social maps. There is another very fun map to watch, thanks to Earth2Tech, where you can see coal plants go offline.

There was a recent addition to the growing mass of pins – Georgia Power is looking to convert an Albany coal-fired power plant to a wood biomass plant. The plant is marked with a special green pin to show that it is switching to renewable.

My favorite part of the news blip is that the biomass plant will actually be cheaper to run, let alone that it cuts emissions and uses a renewable source of fuel. It’s great to see businesses realize that renewable energy is quickly becoming less expensive to provide, and I hope that fact will help this map be covered in pins, and soon.

Another couple of pins will be going up within the next four years, as a two Xcel Energy plants in Colorado are shut down, being replaced by natural gas and solar. What a nice way to start out a Monday.

Via Earth2Tech

They say losing weight can be easier when you do it as part of a group. You can have all the diet shakes, meal plans, and gym memberships you want, but sometimes you just need people to do it with you. So too can be the story of cutting gas from your budget.

Hypermilers have the Kiwis, the Drivemaster Pros, sure; but now they have a new online networking group through Fuelly that can help them track their mileage and gas consumption, and compare and discuss their efforts with other hypermilers.

Because users add their vehicles to their profiles, you can see how efficient other drivers of your same make and model vehicle can be, so you can compare apples to apples to see if there is more room for improvement in your own driving.

There are also forums where people can share all the secrets of stretching each drop of gas – coasting down hills, utilizing neutral, predicting light changes so you don’t waste acceleration just to have to stop at a red. In this way, Fuelly’s online networking helps users maximize the efficiency they get out of each tank.

The site is still fairly basic, but the forum has a place for site issues, so it looks like the creators will be constantly improving it and making it more detailed.