lighting

photo by James Gordon

Baghdad may not be able to provide city residents enough electricity from the grid to keep the lights on in people’s homes and businesses for more than half the day, but the streetlights may soon may have a more reliable source of power. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Iraqi Electricity Ministry and the U.S. military are in the process of installing solar-powered street lighting throughout the capital.

Security Impetus For Solar Lighting
The Electricity m...

Image from HealthyLivingNYC.

While there are books aplenty today about going green, greening your lifestyle and green for dummies, The Climate Diet is the first to offer you greening solutions in terms of a weight watchers diet. The book also shows how you can not only cut emissions but also save money by cutting out the excess in your life.

The Climate Diet: How You Can Cut Carbon, Cut Costs, And Save the Planet, by Jonathan Harrington, offers readers tips on how to reduce their carbon footprint in areas of their life, such as, heating, transportation, community and home. While it’s a good ‘how to go green’ book, it doesn’t necessa...

Recycle Light is Eco-Art, not Eco-Easy
Recycle Lights, the moniker of Berlin artist Johanna Keimeyer's newest collection, may make recycling simple for the elite clients and businesses that acquire pieces of Keimeyer's art. And perhaps many of us could easily see a certain beauty in bottle designs, if we stopped to think about it for a moment before trashing the empty containers. But bringing the beauty of out of discarded plastic containers, transforming garbage into resplendent glory, requires artistic talents and an elaborate process.

Keimeier's Recycle Lights have earned a place in the exhibition "Adventure...

Back in the day when TreeHugger was young we used to show every new innovative and sometimes silly use of LEDs. They have become so common and omnipresent that we rarely do any more, but could not pass up this plastic bench that lets you "relax in your favorite atmosphere by letting the Light bench smoothly transition from one hue to the other"... "Almost an art object, the Light Bench creates the right presence in creative and communicative environments. Again thanks to its LED lighting technology it only requires about 95 watts of electric power which keeps operating costs down and protects the environment."

Protects the environment? By sucking 95 watts to light a plastic bench? I don't ...

A enlightening hole full of crap and trash won a $200,000 grant from the World Bank. More specifically, Lebônê Solutions is one of 16 winners in the World Bank’s Lighting Africa 2008 Development Competition for their work on implementing Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) to provide light to rural Africans that are currently stranded in the dark.

In most African countries, 95% of the population is living off-grid with no access to electricity. Lebone's solution is the implementation of a combination of highly efficient PLED lights powered by MFCs. These fuel cells run on animal and plant waste and naturally occurring soil microbes.

Jonas Samson, an innovative interior designer from the Netherlands, has created a new kind of wallpaper that also serves as a light source. Samson's wallpaper will enable us to use two-dimensional light sources instead of the 3D lighting fixtures currently in use around the world. The light emitting wallpaper can be turned on and off and is made of light emitting diodes (LEDs), which consume very little power and are relatively cheap.

Put down that red pencil, editor Meg, that is not a typo. Dutch designer Pieke Bergmans puts LEDs into hand blown crystal light blubs, shown in Milan this month. She says:

"You may wonder: What is a light blub?? The answer is simple: it is a light bulb that has gone way out of line. Infected by the dreaded Design Virus, these Blubs have taken on all kinds of forms and sizes you wouldn’t expect from such well behaving and reliable little products."

Dezeen Reports that "The Light Blubs are a series of crystal lamps, designed by Pieke Bergmans, in cooperation with Royal Crystal Leerdam. The lamps are ...

Whenever we peddle the virtues of compact fluorescents, we get the same complaints about either the mercury and the quality of light. People take it so seriously that politicians actually propose the "Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act"

The

Back in 2007, our post on a 9W LED replacement for a 70W incandescent generated a huge amount of interest and debate. While some were excited to see the dawn of a new lighting technology, others felt it was overpriced and under-powered, in terms of lumen output. We wonder, then, what our readership will make of the new EvoLux 13W LED bulb, which the manufacturers claim will replace a 100W incandescent, or a 13W CFL, and can apparently last as long as 50,000 hours (for comparison purposes, thi...

Best Green-Ass Ads, Number 1

The Green Movement needs to compete for consumer attention. Funny, eye-catching ads open the door for change. As an inspiration, we bring you the five best ads featuring buttocks, mostly naked buttocks, to sell the environmental cause. Top ranked: Greenpeace's You Are My Sunshine Ad for energy efficient lightbulbs. File under: "Only the British..."...

Photo credit: Getty Images

Here's an interesting new way to think about energy efficiency: a study done by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University revealed that it takes between 3,000 gallons and 6,000 gallons of water to power a 60-watt incandescent bulb for 12 hours a day over the course of a year.

The researchers -- Virginia Tech professor Tamim Younos and undergraduate student Rachelle Hill -- are crunching the numbers to determine the water-efficiency of some of the most common energy sources and power generating methods. The most water-efficient energy sources are natural gas (th...

Photo Credit: Loop.ph

It looks like Loop.ph, a UK-based design research studio, has (re)created the perfect tree: by day, it offers shelter from the sun: by night, it sheds light for the local community, using the energy collected in solar cells embedded in its canopy. Its name: Sonumbra. It is a ‘sonic shade of light’ as the designers Rachel Wingfield & Mathias Gmachl like to describe it. ...