Lenovo recently released the ThinkCentre A61e, a brand new green computer. The ThinkCentre A61e uses few hazardous materials, consumes little power and is easy to recycle. Because of that it has received the desirable EPEAT Gold status.

Peter Schrady with the really long title of vice president and general manager, Emerging Products Business Unit says that “the importance of maximizing energy efficiency and being environmentally conscious is touching all aspects of our daily lives, from the light bulbs we use to light our homes to the hybrid cars we drive to the green technology we rely on to run our businesses.”

Un-customized it uses an AMD Sempron LE 1150 processor, 512MB ATI Radeon X1200, 512MB Memory, 80GB hard drive and costs $399. Not too shabby. Sure the computer is ugly (or shall we say retro?) but it’s still one of the more high performing green computers out there.

According to Lenovo using the energy-efficient AMD Athlon X2 dual core and AMD Sempron single core processors can help save up to 50 percent in energy costs annually.

Another good thing is that Lenovo ranks high in the Green Electronics Guide from Greenpeace. They are currently on the 4th place being beaten only by Dell (on third place).

Press Release: Lenovo Raises Energy-Efficiency Bar with Its Smallest, Quietest Desktop PC

During the last decades, the byproducts of humanity’s activities have altered most of the earth’s characteristics. As a concequence, many sources that used to exist in large quantities now face depletion.

Two of the most famous of such sources are oxygen and water.To begin with oxygen, it is highly connected with forests and their mass deforestration. Whenever a law tries to protect them, fires are set up. Concequently, we have the greenhouse effect, which is the increase of gasses such as carbon dioxide at the earth’s atmosphere, reducing the oxygen and increasing temperature. Water is a huge problem too, heading to a great worsening. Fresh water is highly polluted and wasted for no good reason on daily basis. Therefore, it becomes less and less every day.

So we need to take measures. Everybody can contribute to tackle both problems. Besides the usual tips like careful use of water, it’s vital that all houses, especially at the city centre, have lots of plants,in the gardens, at balconies, on terraces. In this way much of the emissions of carbon dioxide are taken away by the plants to produce oxygen. But having plants means bigger consumption of water, which we also want to save, so what do we do?

Fortunately there are plants that need little water.Those usually have small and narrow leaves,and don’t produce much oxygen( for example cactuses). So the trick is to have plants that have as wide leaves as possible, in combination with needing little water. Such plants are different from country to country, so we have to visit a good flowershop and get informed of which ones to choose.

The German web host Strato has stated that it will be completely carbon-free in January 2008. The impressive thing is that they will go the whole way with real renewable green energy and not just purchasing green tags (RECs).

Does it sound like a mission impossible or a PR-coup to you? It’s not. Strato has already proven that they mean serious by having reduced its energy usage with 30 % per customer in the past 18 months.

In an interview with The Register the CEO of Strat, Damien Schmidt, said that “while people may be more aware of reducing their individual carbon footprint, it was also important for tech firms to “look behind the screen” and consider the sizable, carbon-munching emissions spat out by IT equipment.”

Green Blog is happy to see that more and more web host companies are taking their responsibility by going green and wish Strato the best of luck.

http://www.strato.de

Google is probably one of the most successful Internet companies, ever. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, have transformed the well-known company from an ordinary search engine site to a successful global advertising company. The good thing is that they are turning more and more into a green company.

For example they have plans for a massive solar installation at its campus. They are investing millions of dollar in companies seeking to make plug-in hybrid vehicles a reality. Google are also teaming up with green companies and doing many more things pushing Google to a more sustainable and environment friendly company.

But Google also keep giving us mixed feelings about them. Their motto is “do no evil” but apparently you don’t always need to use it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I talked about how you can fight global warming by buying a laptop due to the fact that they generally use less energy than an ordinary desktop computer.

But it doesn’t really matter if you use a laptop or a desktop computer if you don’t activate the computers power saving settings. And don’t think for a second that your computers screen saver saves energy. Unless the screen or backlight on a laptop or desktop screen actually turns off, a screen saver uses as much power as word processing.

So the best way to save energy is to activate your computers power saving features. Activate your computers sleep mode so that your computer goes to “sleep” while you are (afk) away from keyboard. But don’t worry! Activating the sleep mode doesn’t mean that the computer shuts itself off while you’re not around. All the work and things you were doing before will still be there when you return.

You can also choose to switch off your monitor or spin down the hard drives after a certain amount of time away from your computer. Your power settings also allow you to completely shutdown your computer if you haven’t used it for a while.

But doing all this can be tricky if you aren’t an experienced computer user. So the easiest way is to use a program called LocalCooling. It’s a neat program where it’s only downsides are that it only works on Windows computers.

LocalCooling let’s you easily decide what kind of power saving mode you want to use on your computer and it shows you how much energy your computer uses. The best part is that it shows how many trees, gallons of oil or electricity you have saved when having these power saving settings on. It’s really neat!

If you want you are welcome to join Green-Blogs very own LocalCooling group. This is how you do:

Read the rest of this entry »

As said before we tend to keep all the videos in our forum. But some videos are too good to only be featured on the forum. This video is one of them:

Read the rest of this entry »

Laptops are generally more environmental friendly than their “big brothers”. So if you are planning on getting a new computer you should consider a laptop instead of a stationary (desktop) computer.

A stationary or desktop computer usually uses around 130 watts while a laptop only uses around 15 watts, and sometimes that is with the same tech specs. Other good things are that laptops are smaller and use less packaging, meaning less transport and storage space needed.

When looking for a new computer you should look for an Energy Star-rated laptop and you might also want to check out the Green Electronics Guide from Greenpeace.

Another good option besides a laptop is Zonbu, the first zero-emissions personal computer.

Image credit: Simon Law. Image licensed under a
Creative-Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Would you be interested in moving to a “green” web host? Well that has been our question for a couple of weeks now. And if you look at the final results a majority of our readers would actually be interested in moving to an environmental friendly web host.

According to you it doesn’t matter if a green web host cost a little extra. Only 9% would like to move to a green web host but can’t because “they cost too much”.

Around 30% of you haven’t yet fully understood what a “green” web host actually is. That’s okay, we understand that. That’s why we will soon dedicate a whole section of our site were we will try to explain what separates green web hosts from normal (dirty) web hosts.

Only about 4% of our visitors (or at least the ones who have voted) don’t want to move to a green web host. Are you stubborn or don’t you know what’s at stake? Please tell us why you don’t want to move to a green web host.

• Yes! (57%)
• What’s a “green” web host? (30%)
• Yes, but they cost too much. (9%)
• No! (4%)

Our new poll question is: Are you currently hosted on a “green” web host?

Here comes a few good links to stuff that we haven’t been able to blog about this week. If you know any other please come and share them in our forum or send us a email. We love emails but we get a lot of them every day so we might not be able to respond to your email. But don’t worry, we read every single email!

• Carbon Catalog lists over 30 voluntary carbon offset providers and 120 of
  their projects around the world. Every project and provider is mapped and
  categorized for easy access.
• Recycling Your Electronics Made Easy - Here are some ways to recycle your old electronics.
• Comedy Central wants you to “Address the Mess” - Do I really need to say more?
• Toshibas new Portégé R500 laptop has been featured both on TreeHugger and EcoGeek.
• It’s time to do some action people. This time lets stop the slaughter of sharks in Ecuador.
• Green Options reports that Best Buy Decides That All Future Stores Will Be Eco-Friendly.
• We learned that in 2050 Most polar bears could be lost and we will have dramatic sea ice loss.

It probably first started when Discovery Communications bought TreeHugger earlier this summer. That meant the start of a more commercialized TreeHugger. Cause in the end all that matters for Discovery Communications is that they make money from TreeHugger. So doing paid blog posts wasn’t probably a hard choice to make.

But what exactly is paid blog posts then? Well, paid blog posts are actually advertisement posted as a regular post on a blog. Most blogs that does this usually disclose that the post in question is a paid advertisement.

I personally don’t see anything wrong with TreeHugger doing a few paid blog posts now and then. It’s sad that they do, but it’s not a problem, at least not for me.

The problem is that they do not tell their visitors that what they read is an advertisement from a company that has paid the author to post about certain things. And that is just stupidity and disrespect for your readers who trust that you give them truthful content that isn’t mixed in some way.

TreeHugger needs to get it acts together and properly disclose that the blog post you are currently reading is a paid advertisement. Otherwise TreeHuggers good reputation is at stake.

Here are two examples of paid blog posts on TreeHugger for those who are interested:

- In An Absolut World…Everything is Downloadable
- In An Absolut World: David Graas