Hasta La Gadget!

A new web service, Tada Yasai (”free vegetables”), as the name suggests, is offering people veggies completely without charge.

You do have to pay the delivery costs but essentially there is no catch. The vegetables and fruit are simply left-overs from local farmers in Saitama and Gunma, including produce that is not necessarily fit for the supermarkets (e.g. because the potato is an odd shape). Rather than waste the food they will send it to people who don’t mind eating “imperfect” vegetables. Since it comes straight from the fields the taste or freshness won’t be any different to what you buy from the shelves.

Much like the Noka no Daikoku restaurants, the focus of the site is on the participating farmers themselves, who are all mentioned by name and get their own detailed profile pages like minor celebrities.

Obviously the volume of vegetables on offer is limited (often to around 30 or 40 portions) and you do have to become a member of Tada Yasai to apply for the food, but it still seems a great deal to me! Certain produce is also for sale through the site, so the project is also kind of a promotion for that service. They have obviously gone to a lot of effort with the website and it will be interesting to see if they develop a full retail model beyond just the mottainai ethos of not wasting food.

Japan’s eco consciousness is strongly tied to issues surrounding its own dismal food self-sufficiency levels. As we covered in detail in our Eco Japan Report in 2010, this has led to a number of innovations, including restaurant ranking systems based on proportions of local produce used. More and more veggie-themed restaurants have been popping up recently as well.

Farmers apparently have a lot of glamor in Japan at the moment. Echoing the nogyaru trend from a couple of years ago, a former member of pop group Morning Musume also recently announced she was stopping her modeling and entertainment work to go green-fingered professionally.

[Via Mono Watch]

Garbage in Tokyo is pretty well managed to at least appear to be “eco“, though not as strictly as outside of the capital. Back in the days when we were living in Mie Prefecture, neighbors would constantly monitor the trash bags on the curb to make sure that they didn’t contain prohibited items like (horror!) cans or (horror of horrors!) plastic or glass bottles. Those had to go out on a different day, and were even sorted on the curb by color. Tokyo doesn’t go that far, but we still have to buy the properly labeled garbage bags or they won’t get picked up. Of course, some produce more garbage than others!

Given space limitations, it’s not hard to see why McDonalds would need to pile tons of garbage on the curb for pick-up, but I was pretty surprised to see it all right there in front of the restaurant entrance.

Then, two nights later, I was out with a client from the beverage industry, and he couldn’t help laughing when a Vitamin Water branded trash truck filled with bags came by. These guys were picking up the plastic PET bottles from bins, so it was recycling-based, but is it really such a great idea to associate your brand with piles of garbage?

The writers over at Busy Mommy Media have run the Nissan Leaf through a special battery of ‘family’ tests to produce the kind of review of the EV that we don’t see every day around here. Still, the family perspective is an especially interesting one for the electric vehicle, since widespread adoption will largely depend on how it fares in just such lifestyles. So how did the Leaf fare? Exceedingly well, it turns out, getting high marks for performance, cargo space, and interior space. The only problem raised was the fact that the reviewer could not fit all three of her required car seats into the back seat, but was able to change them out for slimmer models which did, in fact, fit. Check out the video after the break for the full mommy (and daddy) treatment.

Continue reading Nissan Leaf gets the ‘family’ review treatment, earns high marks

Nissan Leaf gets the ‘family’ review treatment, earns high marks originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have you ever received a PDF in your email, only to find yourself weeping moments later after accidentally printing 349 copies and murdering six or seven endangered trees in the Panamanian rain forest? It’s more serious of a problem than you may realize. In order to solve spontaneous bouts of Accident Print Syndrome, the World Wide Fund For Nature has created the WWF file format. We’ll let the entity itself explain:

The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don’t need printing out – then simply save them as WWF.

For now, it’s only readable on a Mac, which means that WWF files also cannot be printed from a PC. We’re envisioning a world of college professors using these to prevent printable study guides, but so as long as hackers also exist in that same universe, those who prefer their documents on paper — and HP’s ink department — will probably figure out their own road to nirvana. Must to the dismay of Ma Earth, of course.

WWF file format: it’s like a PDF that’s impossible to print originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Lifehacker  |  Save as WWF  | Email this | Comments

Coca-Cola Japan will be getting in on the 3D craze by launching a new vending machine that goes beyond the usual “flat” approach of most models.

From January next year consumers in Japan will start to see the 3D Vis machines around the country, equipped with sleek dynamic “three-dimensional curves” and design.

[Image source]

The beverages manufacturer plans to install 980 thousand of the units by 2020, though the changes are not just aesthetic. They will come complete with LED lighting, mini solar panels and counters showing the social contributions the machine’s sales have made. And it certainly isn’t a surprise to see that these vendors are aiming to be as cashless as possible, loaded with multiple e-money options.

Anyone who has studied Japanese vending machines will also know that they are one of the most innovative sites for Japanese ecological developments. Coca-Cola has already done a lot of work here and the new vendors are definitely not a step in a different direction. They will be using non-CFC refrigerating systems and heat pumps in efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of each machine.