Hasta La Gadget!

A small town in Sweden has a lofty goal: to eliminate the use of fossil fuels for heating. And so far its working, as fossil fuel use has been cut down by a staggering 50 percent.

Kristianstad, with a population of around 80,000, has instead started using biogas, a methane gas that is made from biological waste. As an agricultural community, Kristianstad this is a perfect set-up as the city already produces the necessary ingredients for the fuel. The biogas is created from a wide range of waste items, including potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines. And it’s not just good for the environment, it’s also has financial benefits. The cost to heat city buildings has been cut by more than half, from $7 million to just $3.2 million.

Via the New York Times

Deforestation is a big problem in the Amazon rain forest, the largest such forest in the world, and now technology is being used to help fight the issue. Amazonian trees are being implanted with microchips in order to prevent illegal logging.

Each chip contains a variety of useful information, including the location and size of the tree. This information gives those who buy the wood the knowledge of where it came from and who cut it down. With this information buyers can determine whether or not the tree was cut down by an illegal logging operation. The hope is that the technology will help deter such activity.

“People talk a lot these days about wood coming from sustainable forestry practices–this is a system that can prove it,” forestry engineer Paulo Borges told Reuters.

A driver is San Francisco is now the world’s first owner of Nissan’s new electric car, the Leaf. The U.S. delivery came days before the car’s Japanese launch. Nissan last night called it “the first delivery of an affordable, mass-market, all-electric car since the first days of the automotive era.”

The lucky owner is one Olivier Chalouhi, a Bay Area-based technology entrepreneur. Chalouhi seems pretty satisfied with his purchase thus far, telling the press, “It’s great on the highway. When you accelerate, it sounds like you have a jet engine or a turbine under the hood… You have to hear it–it’s very futuristic.”

The five-seater goes on sale in Japan on December 20th. Here in the U.S., pre-orders have already old out. More of those vehicles will be delivered this week in California, Arizon, Oregon, and Washington state.

A new hybrid vehicle is helping to keep the streets of New York City clean.

Dubbed the Allianz 4000, the new vehicle is touted as being the world’s first hybrid street sweeper. The vehicle features a 200 horse power diesel engine and two 12 volt lithium-ion batteries. It can reach speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and, according to the manufacturer, provides 40 percent in fuel savings when compared to non-hybrid sweepers. As it turns out, the process of making a hybrid sweeper is more difficult than you might imagine.

“A sweeper is not a typical light duty truck and therefore we need to be able to accommodate many different functions including transport, sweeping, dust control, and emmission compliance,” Allianz sales manager Chad Bormann told Wired. “We have the ability to operate using a smaller single diesel engine running at lower RPMs. This alone creates savings against any street sweeper that requires an auxilliary engine in conjunction with the chassis engine to drive and operate the sweep functions. The fuel savings are extreme and the carbon footprint minimal considering that street sweepers are operated for long shifts daily all over the world.”

The Allianz 4000 is currently prowling the streets of New York, but the manufacturer hopes to expand to other cities in the future as well.

There are plenty of companies testing out new ways of reusing and recycling packaging as a way to reduce waste. We’ve seen the reusable Replenish household cleaner, and now New Soap, Old Bottle: a company that sells soap and cleaners in recycled soda and beer bottles.

The company takes old glass and plastic bottles, cleans and sanitizes them, and then resells the bottles. Only this time they’re filled with something new. So you can buy an old Coke bottle full of glass cleaner or a Heineken bottle filled with antibacterial hand soap. The prices are quite reasonable, with most products clocking in at under five dollars, and you can even buy extra spray tops or soap pumps.

New Soap, Old Bottle doesn’t actually make its own product. Instead, it purchases brand name soap and cleaners by the barrel, repackages it in recycled bottles, and then sells it. You can check out the products on offer here.

Via Treehugger