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

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.  

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.

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.

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?

Convenience. Bring it to the people. Location, availability, and city planning are critical. Seville currently has 250 stations and 2500 bikes available. Stations are located approximately 600 feet apart and in close proximity to public transport stops. That means there’s bound to be a station near all the places you frequent: home, work, school, stores and entertainment.

Security. Eliminate the allure. Many early attempts to roll out community bike programs failed due to skyrocketing theft rates.  By creating a proprietary design with unique parts that cannot be used on other brands or models, stolen bikes have little to no resale value.  Paired with an automated system that only unlocks a bike with the swipe of a subscription card (associated with a credit card) theft is no longer an issue.

Payment. Make it fast and easy. The ability to sign up for a “subscription” makes frequent bike usage a cinch. People can start a subscription from a self-service kiosk at any of the 250 stations around the city. Various types of subscriptions including hourly, weekly and yearly options make it work for anyone interested in borrowing a bike. Simply swipe your card, enter your pin and the system will unlock a bike for you at a specified stall.

Safety. Minimize fear and danger. Throughout Seville’s major streets are dedicated lanes for cyclists. Not just a patch of road with a painted line, but areas set away from auto traffic wide enough to accommodate bikers going in each direction as well as pedestrians. By reducing the danger factor, the barrier of fear is significantly decreased and leads to greater adoption by Seville’s residents and visitors alike.

Comfort. Consider the path. Sevici bikes have adjustable components, front and rear headlights, gears that change easily and a large front basket. These seemingly small details go a long way for someone on their way home from work, stopping at the market and getting home after dark.

Business model. Find funding. Like several other European cities, Seville partnered with an advertising agency to make the program a reality. The agency, JC Decaux, provides the bikes to the city and gains exclusive rights to advertising space on the bikes, and the station structures.
Clearly many European cities have gotten the memo on the success of community bike programs. But what about here in the U.S.? Several American cities have implemented their own versions of bike sharing, but in spring 2008 Washington, D.C. was the first U.S. city to launch a fully automated system. The program, called SmartBike provides 120 bikes at 10 locations throughout central areas of the city.

Will the same model work in a different place for yet another culture? Will Americans embrace bikes as so many Europeans have? It’s hard to say, but surely time will tell.

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.

Another interesting alternative is bio-degradable PVC. While not exactly the plastic of choice for building materials (I’d rather my window frames didn’t disintegrate in 4 years), bio-degradable PVC might work alright in credit cards. Of course, we’d be side-stepping the primary concern of card incineration–biodegradable PVC is just as dioxin prone as non-biodegradable.

So how about just using a more environmentally friendly plastic like PET (water bottles) or HDPE (milk bottles)? Many cards use PET laminates already, and the critical components of the card, like the magnetic stripe, signature panel, graphics, etc. work fine on PET. It ends up one of the big hurdles for PET is the most recognizable and defining element–the embossed account number. PVC is just about perfect for embossing and PET is, well, challenging. Our other alternative HDPE is relatively soft, and just doesn’t make a very appealing card. There is a volume of other plastic resins to choose from, but you quickly start to climb the increasing cost and toxicity slope.

Which leaves us with…PVC. At least for now within the constraints of our investigation. This is not an endorsement of PVC, but rather an acknowledgement of the challenges faced by a deeply embedded industry with a mega-base of installed technology. We’ve got lots of ideas about alternative card formats based on various eco-friendly materials, but not any easy “swap-in” replacements for PVC without tradeoffs.

Material substitution is a logical first step toward sustainability, but our world is filled with highly specialized materials. Some materials have been custom designed to fulfill a specific need, and some industries have been built up over decades based on the specific properties of one material. We can change, but the real solution will require altering industry’s (and our own) status quo.

[Photo: Andres Rueda]

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.