In Continuum’s work for Preserve, they designed the first truly environmentally responsible toothbrush, one that enables consumers to act green while caring for their pearly whites. Preserve, who has been making toothbrushes from recycled yogurt cups since 1997, partnered with Continuum to decrease their environmental impact—and the Preserve Mail-Back Pack Toothbrush was born.

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.

Last week, I had the pleasure of judging the first annual Staples Global EcoEasy Challenge, a competition among universities from around the world to develop the next environmentally friendly office product. Some of the world’s top engineering students, from colleges and universities in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, and the United States, presented some really clever ideas.

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/

final blog in a series of 5

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

Design Overview

The electricity monitoring system consists of two major components. The first component is the utility meter reading device, the second is the data server. The utility meter reader monitors electricity usage and sends the latest value to the data server via TCP/IP sockets. The data server stores this value and serves the historical data through custom Perl scripts for web page display or RSS feed.

Utility meter reading in the electrical closet.

Overview

The Elster A3 Alpha utility meter has a blinking box (called Kh in the manual) on the LCD display with a blink frequency proportional to the instantaneous power use (marked by A in the above image). Every time the box changes state, this indicates .9kWh have been used. This will be our method of monitoring instantaneous power use. 

 In short this is an Embedded Linux device centered upon a Freescale iMx21 processor. It optically reads power usage from the utility meter and feeds the latest power consumption data to the server through a custom TCP/IP socket.

 The main requirement for the meter reader was flexibility. Some other requirements are video input/output and Ethernet. As a result I decided to use an ARM based processor that could run embedded Linux. This would allow me to develop software in a flexible Linux setting using GNU libraries and I would have a greater array of compatible hardware peripherals should I need them. 

Freescale iMX

We have worked with Freescale iMX processors on a few previous projects before so I knew they would be sufficient for my needs.  The iMX21 micro has an Enhanced Multi-Media Acceleration (EMMA) peripheral built in which frees the ARM processor from some of the intensive video manipulation tasks. The M9328MX21ADS development board from Freescale comes with an Embedded Linux BSP making it a very attractive platform for its “out of the box” quality.  Plus Gerry Vahe the FAE at Freescale is an Embedded Linux buff and he is a great resource because if you have ever built an embedded Linux development environment you know it can be a headache at times!

Freescale M9328MX21ADS development board, some notable features: 

·     IMX21 Arm Processor

·      Video Camera

·     3.5″ TGT QVGA LCD module 

·        Ethernet Interface, RS232

·     Hardware based RS232 bootloader ensuring I can never “brick” my device. 

Freescale Linux BSP with LTIB

·     Powerful kernel containing drivers for hardware included with the ADS dev. board

·      Blob TCP/IP bootloader featuring NFS capabilities & RS232 shell terminal

·      Includes GNU arm compilers and libraries

·      Includes a large array of demonstration applications and utilities.

I especially like the flexibility of deleloping an embedded device using NFS (Network File System). With NFS I don’t need to flash the device with new firmware for each build, I just recompile and reboot the device. The bootloader is setup with the proper IPs to fetch the kernel and file system image from my Linux development machine.

Tune in next week for a description of the software.  

2 of a 5 part series

Option 1

There are many options to monitoring power use.  One such way is to attach inductive coils around the main power lines to monitor Voltage and Current.  There are lots of products on the market that can be used in a residential setting.  These products require direct access to the mains power lines, but our commercial electrical closet has a main circuit breaker indicating 4000 Amps.  There is no way we were going anywhere near that!  Since we did not want to professionally install any expensive equipment for this initial experimentation stage we opted not to go this route.

from Elster Alpha Plus manual

Option 2

The Elster utility meter has an ANSI C12 Infrared data port on the front (marked by B in the above image) offering the ability to read power measurements from the meter.  The hardware protocol is a simple RS232 like-Infrared serial protocol.  We initially considered using this data port to read data from the meter but upon talking to NStar about it they told us we were not permitted to attach anything to the meter itself as this would be a violation of the meter lease agreement.

Option 3

The Elster meter has a numerical LCD display of the total watt/hours accumulated by the meter over a finite period of time.  We considered implementing an Optical Character Recognition system that would read the values on the LCD with a webcam and convert that to power use.  Unfortunately the values seemed to only update on a daily basis.  We wanted at least up to the minute resolution so this method was out of the question.

Option 4

After some research on the Elster A3 Alpha utility meter I found that there is a blinking box on the LCD display that has a frequency proportional to the instantaneous power use (marked by A in the above image).  Every time the box changes state, this indicates .9kWh (kilo Watt hours) have been used.  Finally a feature we can work with!  We will watch the blinking box with a web cam on an embedded Linux device and determine the energy use by monitoring the blink rate.

Tune in next week where I discuss the electronics and software design.

Read more

On a recent trip to Spain I had the pleasure of visiting Seville for a few days. It was even more vibrant than I recalled from my prior visit in 2000. Sitting at cafes I enjoyed the sounds of varied tongues surrounding me—Spanish, German, French, Dutch, some completely unrecognizable. I returned to the gardens and again admired the Mudejar architecture.  But, in the midst of this old city was a new variety of charm: bikes.

There were businessmen on bikes. College students on bikes. Moms, Dads, teens on bikes. Bikes, bikes, bikes.

Sevici, launched in April 2007, is Seville’s thriving public bike program. Taking the lead from other European cities such as Lyon, Paris, and London, the program was implemented to reduce environmental and noise pollution, lessen road traffic, and provide a convenient service to city residents. So far, so good.

The key to the success of Sevici and other thriving bike share programs: smart design.

Employing learnings from the failures and successes of other bike share programs, Sevici offers a service that fits into people’s lives as they are.  It not only makes life easier, it enhances people’s lives by replacing the chore of commuting with a pleasant, refreshing activity.

So. What makes it work?

Read more

There has been enough buzz around the PVC problem in the last 10 years that many credit card holders are aware of it, and would prefer a cleaner alternative.

It’s hard to know how many credit cards are really out there, but if every household in the US (~100 million) has 10-20 cards that’s 1-2 billion cards just in the US (yeah, that’s a lot of cards), using 10 million pounds of PVC (about 0.01 lbs/card).

Enter PLA–Polylactide or polylactic acid resin. This stuff has been around a while, and sounds great…made from corn, it’s biodegradable, compostable and renewable so it should be pretty eco-friendly right?

Unfortunately, not really.

There is a down side, at least for the near future. PLA is pretty energy intensive (like corn-based ethanol…don’t get me started), and most of our corn is grown in states whose electricity is coming from coal-fired power plants. Add to that the fact that corn-based products are competing with a food source and it’s reason to pause. Plant-based polymers have to be part of our future, but there’s still work to do.

Read more

If you are an “ecogeek” like me you might have noticed all the products, services, and research that revolve around monitoring one’s power usage in real time.  Among the first commercially available products was the PowerCost Monitor from BlueLine Innovations.  NStar (the local power utility here in Boston) offered these little gadgets to a few hundred customers at a discount after conclusive research showed that personal power usage dropped about 5-15% when monitored in real time.

Real time means that when you turn off a light bulb you can see your KilloWattHour number drop within seconds, allowing you to understand in dollars and cents how much energy a typical 100 watt light bulb consumes.  This is a win-win situation for all- save money, save power and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This trend has continued to evolve and DIYers have joined in the fun.  Electronics designers have submitted two product ideas to the Core77 Greener Gadgets design competition.   The first was a Do-It-Yourself power monitoring device made from typical household products similar to the Kill-A-Watt from P3.

A year ago monitoring your power use in real time was a novel idea, now we need to take this information off the simple LCD display and feed it into the web.  Enter the Tweet-A-Watt by Limor Fried.  The Tweet-A-Watt basically takes the concept of real time power monitoring and offers the information to you and the public and is accessible from anywhere.

This concept offers the ability to feed this information into social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. You could also be monitoring your power usage constantly through your smart phone (i.e. iPhone or Android), or crunching numbers and graphing through Google’s Power Meter.

I would really like to see this real time information offered via open standard protocols to inspire applications for all internet ready devices like the Chumby or iPhone.  Since Google seems to be the first large organization to aggregate this information, I am looking to Google to establish the standard.