My neighbor, Steve Jobs (how’s that for name dropping), will likely unveil the 3G iPhone today. He called and asked me what I thought about the idea. The message is on my phone. (right!)

FWIW, I do live about 3 miles from Apple HQ. Jobs lives in the mountains and I live in the low-rent district of Silicon Valley.

This new 3G iPhone:

1. higher speed

2. links to corporate e-mail systems

3. threatens the Blackberry

4. miles (kilometers) behind anything the Japanese already offer

5. hopes to be bought up by some 10 million users this year.

What I want to know is what’s going to become of the pile of 2G iPhones that users can be expected to discard?

Can’t use them for land fill. Can’t build a house over them. Can’t even boil them till they are soft enough to eat.

So, what does become of all those cell phones that are no longer needed? Huh?

source

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe for updates to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and please do come back!

What you see is the “world’s first eco-friendly premium spirit” produced by McCormick Distilling, America’s oldest continuously operating distillery. The 360 Vodka is trying to enter the ultra luxury vodka segment with this motto but from the begining I’ll have to say there are other brands like Purus or VeeV to compete with.

However getting back to the 360 Vodka, you should know that unlike competition it’s made of regular non-organic grains and the production process was improved to reduce volatile organic compound by 70% and sulfur dioxide emission up to 99%. There are things we can really appreciate. The bottle. 85% it is made of recycled glass, the logo is blown directly into it and the labels are made of 100% PCW paper and uses water based inks.

Impurities are removed in a four times column distillation process and then everything is filtered again, five times through a granulated charcoaled coconut shell filtration process.

We appreciate a new eco-friendly vodka brand on the market, but I don’t think the “world’s first eco-friendly premium spirit” tag is appropriate. Still love the commercial pictures, though.

via Inhabitat

“Tactical Biorefineries” is what they call these new portable generators roughly the size a small moving van that weighs about 4 tons and turn trash into electricity. They’ve been mainly designed for the U.S. military and could be used outside the military shortly after, when the technology evolves (translated: “when they want to”) in the future.

The biorefineries are designed to use multiple types of garbage at once; first it has to separate organic foods from residual trash (paper, plastics, etc). Food waste is sent to a bioreactor and ferments into ethanol while the residual materials are used in a gasifier and turned into low-grade propane gas and methane. But wait, that’s not all because the propane and methane are also being used in a modified diesel engine that powers the generator which produces electricity.

“At any place with a fair amount of food and scrap waste the biorefinery could help reduce electricity costs, and you might even be able to produce some surplus energy to put back on the electrical grid,” said Michael Ladisch, the professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University who leads the project.

The first unit (it costs $1 million)  has been tested in November and the results have been great. Though it works on diesel fuel for a few hours until the gasifier and the bioreactor begin to produce fuel it produced 90 percent more than it consumed.

I’ll have to agree it’s a great piece of technology and lots of places could use one.