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McDonald's is one of several chains exploring green store design. Wal-Mart and Target are revamping their stores to conserve energy. Subway has opened its first stand-alone LEED-certified restaurant in the state in Chapel Hill. A brand-new McDonald's restaurant about to open in North Carolina will be the chain's first in the nation to offer free car charging in its parking garage.
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As we all know, batteries don't last forever. And when the flashlight dims you may be left with a double handful of toxic heavy metals to get rid of somehow. Until very recently mercury has been the main villain, but in addition to mercury, other hazardous metals such as lead, cadmium, chromium, and silver lurk in those little cylinders.
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There are plenty of reasons for people to try to reduce their carbon footprint, ranging from savings on their energy bills to doing the right thing to save the planet. Working on the premise that there's nothing quite so persuasive as cold, hard cash, a new website aims to add a financial incentive by awarding consumers credits for their reductions and then converting those credits into cash.
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Each single day, enough energy is being produced to light up half a million homes. But sadly, that energy is wasted because there is no technology to capture it.
The energy is the kinetic energy produced by the 250 million vehicles traveling U.S. roads daily. One company is developing an exciting new technology that will help capture a portion of that valuable energy.
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Living green is great, but a lot of people think it costs too much money. There are many terms for Residential Solar Energy System such as Grid-Tie (tied into the energy grid), Residential Solar, and Home Solar, but they are all the same thing: a solar electric system that provides clean and renewable power from the sun. Outfitting our house with solar panels is not cheap. Harnessing enough sun to be able to live completely off-grid costs many thousands of dollars, up to many tens of thousands depending on how much energy is needed.
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Once of the 3 R's, Reuse is to use an item more than once. This includes conventional reuse where the item is used again for the same function, and new-life reuse where it is used for a new function. By taking useful products and exchanging them, without reprocessing, reuse help us save time, money, energy and resources. In broader economic terms, reuse offers quality products to people and organizations with limited means, while generating jobs and business activity that contribute to the economy. It can also turn unwanted items into great, useful and beautiful alternatives.
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If we take a look at all of the people walking around in the streets of urban centers today, and we think about all of that expended energy, the possibility of harnessing it is exciting. There could be an interface between our feet and the surface we’re stepping on. It could absorb that movement to generate electricity for the overhead lights and to heat up the coffee.
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Streetlights aren't really necessary when there's a full moon out, with it bouncing all that sunlight down at us and everything. But your average streetlight isn't smart enough to know when it isn't needed, so it sits there, dumbly shining away for no real reason. There's a new concept for these lights that could respond to the waxing and waning of the moon throughout the month. The lamps would dim and brighten as the moon cycles through its phases. In other words, on clear nights at full moon, these lights might even turn off completely.
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Excrement from the billions of animals raised every year in America's factory farms fouled watersheds, especially in the South, feeding oxygen-gobbling algae blooms responsible for rapidly-spreading coastal dead zones.
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Manufacturing plants, combined heat and power plants, paper mills, oil and gas and other companies commonly have low-grade heat as a by-product. This energy goes to waste or in the worst-case scenario the company pays to cool it. It is estimated that 15 to 20 percent of all the energy used in the USA is lost just to this 'low-grade' waste heat. This presents a great opportunity that is too good to pass up, specially for some brilliant engineering outfits.
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