Combining sustainability practices with brand experience expertise, Continuum developed concepts that led to the creation of the innovative new packaging for Preserve. The lightweight package encases the toothbrush, protects it during shipments, presents it well at point of sale, and doubles as a return envelope. Consumers simply return the toothbrush after use in the envelope and mail it back to Preserve, so it can begin its next life stage. Preserve then turns the returned toothbrushes into plastic lumber that can be used for things such as picnic tables and boardwalks.

Read more  about the sustainability, packaging, and brand work Continuum did on this project and the dramatic sales increase Preserve has experienced because of it.

I did a little experiment with the Sun Chips bag to see if the claim that it’s compostable is really true. And after seven weeks in my heated composter, it totally broke down. To be fair, the heated composter stirs several times a day, which greatly accelerates decomposition and makes it possible to use indoors.  The stirring seemed to have broken up the bag, also helping.  All of this went to my friend’s garden; she promised me some Sun Chips when they sprout.

The students from the University of New South Wales in Australia took first place — and a $25,000 grand prize — with their BIND concept, which stands for Binder Interlock Neat Device. A cool innovation that works like a tie-and-ring system for organizing documents, BIND represents an elegant improvement from zip ties, increasing the potential uses and likely reuses of the product. The assumption is that people will use BIND in place of less eco-friendly solutions for binding paper, such as three binders, and will be more likely to hold onto BIND as opposed to the use-and-dispose model associated with most zip ties.

In addition, there were two runners up, who each received $5,000. A team from the University of California Berkeley created an Eco Stapler made of bamboo. It was an obvious eco improvement to the everyday stapler. Nothing surprising, but the idea was well thought out and the team did their homework. Lastly, a team from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras won for the Step Shredder, an innovative idea to make a manually powered shredder. It would encourage exercise (much needed in the work environment!) and reduce energy consumption (much needed in our world). I wonder how receptive the office consumer would be to this idea…

It was great to get a glimpse into the minds of the next generation of designers and engineers. Here are a couple of additional learnings from event:

Ideas – There is no shortage of ideas that could help reduce our impact on the environment. The larger challenge remains; getting consumers to adopt new practices.

Passion – The students were passionate about the environment to the point they were often looking to trade convenience for a more sustainable solutions.

PowerPoint – Who needs PowerPoint? Each presenter used Presi to zoom and circle their way through their ideas, with many incorporating well-produced animations and video shorts.

Storytelling – These students definitely understand the value of a well-told story. Presentations included consideration of how an idea could impact a country, an economy, a business and the consumer.

Science and Emotion – Each presentation presented the math that substantiated the benefits (these were engineers, after all), and they also invested equal time on the emotional values and benefits.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this competition evolves next year, and I hope it can continue to raise awareness around sustainability and the office to help introduce creative solutions that reduce the corporate footprint. Kudos to Staples for taking a responsible leadership position on environmental affairs.

For more information on the event and the winners, go to: http://ecoeasychallenge.com/

There is still quite a bit of detective work to be done. A cursory look at our graphs shows we are using on average 40kWatts (the equivalent of 400, 100 Watt, light bulbs) during nights/weekends and about 120kWatts peak during normal business hours.

From the below graph we can see that during business hours something is causing large spikes. Since this only happens during typical work hours we could probably attribute this behavior to the power hungry tools in our awesome Models Shop, or maybe the elevator. The spikes are probably due to the inductive load introduced when a motor such as a saw or compressor is turned on.

The chart below is a display of power use over a ten day period. You can see the reduced power consumption over the weekends and holidays. I would gather that since there is a small amount of power consumption on Monday May 25th (Memorial Day) some Continuumites are workaholics!

What’s Next

Possible improvements
Migrate data server applications to a proper web server
Add multi client capabilities so we can host data from other users.
Tie in real time power cost metrics
Carbon footprint tie in
Tie in weather parameters such as outside temperature and humidity.

Contribute
If you find this design intriguing and would like to contribute in some way, or if you have any questions feel free to email me at mcosta@dcontinuum.com

The client application runs on the iMx21 meter reader. It contains 2 endless threads SocketThread and LCD Thread.

LCDThread – each iteration of the loop it performs a frame grab using the EZFB API. It converts the image to grayscale then calculates the average pixel intensity for the square we care about. The pixel intensity is low when the box on the Elster LCD is “on” and goes up when the box is cleared. This thread also draws a square onto the LCD screen so the person installing the meter reader can easily align the video camera.

Images of the meter reader output LCD.
The Kh box is visible, note the O/F text output. 1 means the box has been detected.

The Hr box is not visible, note the O/F text output. 0 means the box has not been detected.

The second thread is the SocketThread. This thread waits for a new measurement from the LCDThread. When a new value is ready it just sends the power value over Socket to the web server.

Testing
I tested the accuracy of the box blink rate algorithm with a test LCD display. Using a Microchip Explorer16 Dev board and a PIC24H processor, I rigged up a simple blinking box on the explorer16 LCD. With this test setup I set the blink rate to .1Hz, 1Hz, and 10Hz to verify my Emeter application.

Calculations
This application converts Blink Time to power in kilo-watts. The formula for this calculation is:

Power (kW) = (.9kWh * 3600s * 200) / BlinkTime
The .9kW and 200 are values taken from the meter.

Data & Web Server
The web server is running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, ProFTPD and Apache 2.0

EMeterServer Application
The EMeterServer has only one simple socket thread. This thread just sits and waits for a new Power value from the client. If there is a new value, it writes it to a MySQL database table.

Web Server
The data server hosts the data via simple RSS feed, and Perl scripts. Any internet ready device or web page could access the scripts or RSS feeds to get real time power use.

PowerRss.php – Returns an XML RSS feed that contains the latest power use value.

graphUpdateLong.pl- Returns a link to an image of a graph of the power use over time.

meterUpdate.pl – Returns a link to an image indicating the power use as a simple needle meter.

GoogleJSON2.pl -Returns a JSON object table containing historical power use. (used for Google Visualizations API)

Insert a link to these files in your web browser and you will see the results

http://209.48.56.105/power/PowerRss.php

http://209.48.56.105/power/graphUpdateLong.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/meterUpdate.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/GoogleJSON2.pl

Blog 1 of a 5 part series

A few months ago I posted a blog about real time electricity monitoring and how studies show this generally reduces power consumption.  At that time I had just started a side project to monitor our electricity usage here at Continuum West Newton.  This is a multi part story of my travels.

Intent

To develop a highly flexible system for real time acquisition, storage, and display of electricity usage statistics.

To share this technology with the world facilitating energy use awareness as well as collaboration.

To further promote the concept of a “Smart Grid,” and demonstrate its economic and environmental benefits.

Why Flexibility

The Smart Grid is still under development so we feel that upgradability and modularity are extremely important for such a volatile and fast paced field of innovation.

Leveraging ubiquitous wired/wireless communication infrastructure and protocols such as TCP/IP, 802.11 and Ethernet removes the need for unmanageable proprietary hardware resulting in long term upgradability and modularity.  

Why Real Time

Real time power monitoring has been proven to effectively reduce power consumption due to waste.  It is intuitive to consider that humans need some sort of feedback in order to recognize the presence of waste.  For example if one leaves the faucet open one has sound and sight feedback indicating there is waste.  What sort of feedback do we have for electricity?  None really, this is why these systems can help with waste reduction.

Personal or home use real time power monitoring has proven to be effective but this project is an experiment on efficacy within a commercial setting such as an office building.  It is difficult to quantify ones contribution to power consumption in an office setting.  As a result our analysis will focus on large scale behavior.  One such experiment I am curious to try is to have the entire company turn off their computer monitors for 5-10 minutes and see the change in the real time graph.

Why Transparency

As a dedicated member of the Designers Accord, this is yet another step Continuum has taken towards following our carbon footprint, monitoring our progress and sharing our results with the world.

Why Collaboration

Because the design is “open source” we hope that other energy conscious individuals/ organizations will be inspired to collaborate and contribute, resulting in an ever improving system.  For example due to the flexibility of the system architecture we can easily port our data to be fed into the Google PowerMeter. (That is when Google finally gets their act together and puts this thing online!)

http://www.google.org/powermeter/index.html

Tune in next week where I will discuss how I decided to monitor our electricity use.