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Every year, an estimated 400 million units of obsolete electronics are scrapped. By 2010, this figure will rise to three billion units. While advances in technology continue to improve and enrich our lives, product lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter. And that means an increasing stockpile of end-of-life equipment that needs to be managed. When discarded, much of this equipment ends up in landfills in the US, or is exported to third world countries.
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Imagine browsing at your leisure through an extensive international fashion wardrobe and choosing exactly what you want. Swapping clothes is a huge step towards sustainable living. By sharing what we already have, we are cutting down our consumption massively and reduce our carbon footprint.
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In a world wrapped up in global supply chains, small farmers can only sell to supermarkets and get less cash for your carrots, or spend a lot of time and effort trying to sell directly to customers. Consumers, meanwhile, are torn between loyalty to local businesses and the convenience of those established supply chains.
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One in four of the trucks traveling the world's roads is empty – a waste of money and a blot on the environment. In the highly fragmented truckload transportation industry, a huge amount of trips involves empty trucks. However, reducing the amount of truck repositioning is difficult because the need for a carrier to reposition its vehicles depends on the interactions between the shippers the carrier is serving.
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Our gadgets will eventually break or get replaced. But it's hard to know just what to do with the gadgets that get left behind. Some people stuff them in junk drawers. Most people won't simply junk their car -- they'd trade it in. Why can't that same school of thought apply to electronics?
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Hundreds of thousands of tons of watermelons are lost every year. They are grown and then left in the ground because of superficial imperfections. About 20% of each annual crop is left in the field because of surface blemishes or because they are misshapen; currently these are lost to growers as a source of revenue. Due to imperfections, bad spots, or weird shapes, these watermelons are left in the field and then ploughed right back into the ground.
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What happens to the millions of tons of discarded materials from obsolete infrastructures like Boston’s Big Dig? Destroying it costs millions to tax payers as well as wastes the embodied energy already stored in the materials. Dismantled and relocated, concrete and steel sections can become structural building modules adaptable to a variety of sites and programs.
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As many incentives as there are for consumers to go green these days, 'hot girls' strikes us as fairly novel. A new eco-site called Angry Green Girl is celebrating its launch with a car wash featuring five models sporting teeny green bikinis, who'll sud up eco-friendly cars for free using waterless cleaners. The site will provide earth saving tips, product reviews, home makeovers and green networking.
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Wish you had time and a place to grow your own food? How about all the hassle of digging, watering and caring for your vegetables? Fear no more, now there's a great solution for all of us green sustainable eco couch potatoes.
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A company based in Los Angeles, announced a potential breakthrough in getting oil from pond scum. One big difference from the spate of recent announcements in the algae-sphere: Origin’s new technology promises a better way to “milk” algae to extract their natural oils. Other approaches involve genetically-engineering algae to excrete hydrocarbon-like liquids' and cost is still a huge issue for algae-to-oil operations.
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