Just a cup of water and a bit of detergent. That's all that needs to be added to a virtually waterless washing machine from British company Xeros that's poised to hit the North American market.
The dirty job is done by small nylon beads that pull stains off garments and lock them into the nylon's molecular structure. The beads don't even seem to suffocate easily--they can continue to absorb dirt over hundreds of washes.
Nathan Wrench, program manager at Cambridge Consultants, holds the nylon beads used in Xeros' washing process.
(Credit: Xeros)The technology builds on research out of the U.K.'s University of Leeds and has been applied in a concept washing machine with the help of Cambridge Consultants.
Now, after three years of testing, Xeros, a University of Leeds spinout (forgive the pun), has struck a deal with Kansas City-based GreenEarth Cleaning. It aims to start reselling Xeros washing machines throughout North America next year. (The concept device is being demonstrated Thursday at the Clean Show in New Orleans.)
But you won't be able to save water at home with the Xeros machines yet--the target market consists of commercial dry cleaning and laundry operations.
GreenEarth Cleaning will add the nylon bead technology to its proprietary dry cleaning method based on liquid silicone, or decamethylpentacyclosiloxane if you prefer the scientific name. Commercially, it's simply called D5.
Liquid silicone is a dry cleaning alternative to good old perchloroethylene, which is thought to produce toxic waste and is also classified as a probable human carcinogen.
Another recent alternative is washing with carbon dioxide under such high pressure that it becomes liquid--and no, it doesn't add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as existing CO2 is used, but the downside is the high expense of the machines.
The upside with both CO2 washing and the British nylon beads is that garments are virtually dry immediately after being washed.
It's easy to think these almost-dry-cleaning processes would wear and tear the garments more than traditional laundry, but GreenEarth Cleaning insists there's no difference.
"The testing completed to date has indicated no appreciable difference in wear between garments processed in the Xeros technology versus the traditional laundry process," Tim Maxwell, president of GreenEarth Cleaning, told CNET News. "Extensive testing with silks, embroidered garments, and other delicate items have shown no ill effects."
A chemical used to make LCD televisions and semiconductors could cause more global warming than coal-fired power plants, a report warns.
Nitrogen trifluoride is a "missing greenhouse gas," according to a study
Production of the chemical could double to 8,000 metric tons in 2009, atmospheric chemist Michael Prather, who co-wrote the report, told New Scientist.
Nitrogen trifluoride's globe-warming effect reportedly could be 17,000 times stronger than that of carbon dioxide.
However, the picture is incomplete because nitrogen trifluoride isn't among the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol international climate change agreement.
This year alone, its production would release the equivalent of the global-warming emissions from Austria, totaling some 67 million metric tons, New Scientist noted.
And that would amount to more global-warming pollution than all the industrialized world's emissions of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and of sulfur hexafluoride, which is considered more potent.
Kyoto's terms left out nitrogen trifluoride and some dozen other gases, in part because they weren't produced at a scale large enough to cause significant harm.
Some companies had turned to the man-made chemical initially to reduce pollution.
The market for flat-screen televisions, including LCDs, is expected to boom with the United States' full transition to digital television next February.
Along with it, watchdog groups warn that additional ecological harm could come, if toxic electronics waste isn't disposed of properly. Americans are expected to discard 80 million analog TVs by the end of 2009.
However, LCD televisions are often painted as eco-friendly because they consume less power than plasma and older rear-projection sets.
Making champagne is by no means carbon neutral, as tree-hugging teetotalers might like to note. Carbon dioxide causes the bubbles, after all.
To be exact, champagne makers have determined that making each bottle of bubbly causes the release of 200 grams of carbon dioxide.
Cheers to carbon dioxide. More is involved in every bottle of bubbly than in other wines.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET)Some champagne makers want to shrink emissions by 25 percent within 12 years and up to 75 percent by 2050. They announced the goals Tuesday at the Bordeaux Carbon Initiative, one of many recent events by vintners seeking to green their craft.
The figures do not include all sparkling wine, such as Spanish cava, made outside the Champagne region of France. The methode champenoise was born in Champagne, and only its sparkling wine can claim on the label to be true champagne.
The largest portion of that local industry's carbon emissions--39 percent--comes from bottling and packaging, with another 24 percent released in the process of making the wine, according to the champagne industry. And transportation of wine and workers makes up 13 percent, use of equipment comprise 11 percent, and products used in cellars and vines contribute another 8 percent of emissions.
The Champagne region of France releases 197,000 tons of CO2 each year--about the same as an average British city, according to Decanter Magazine.
Winemakers in Bordeaux, France, meanwhile are trying to tally the greenhouse gas emissions of grape growing, cultivating, packing, and shipping every type of wine. One Bordeaux winemaking family is harvesting sunflowers to make biofuel to power its tractors, according to the AFP.
In sunny California, winemakers are also pushing to reduce their carbon emissions. Last year Shafer Vineyards became the first to switch fully to solar power in Napa and Sonoma counties, where organic and biodynamic wine cultivation have been popular for decades. However, many oenephiles might point out that viticulture and viniculture around the world have been clean, green, and organic for centuries, if not millennia.
Sadly, my colleagues in Barcelona for the GSMA Mobile World Congress last week didn't learn more on the subject by catching the International Climate Change and Wine conference, where Al Gore keynoted.
Winemakers received access to their first tailor-made carbon footprint calculator in December.
Next-generation Web technologies are also enabling wine lovers to assemble virtual cellars and establish new communities. Web 2.0 tools for wine consumers include Snooth, Vinfolio, Bottletalk and Cork'd.
(Credit:
BMW)
As we told you last September, BMW has been kicking around the idea of a fourth brand (in addition to MINI, Rolls Royce, and BMW) for a while. This week it emerges that this new addition to the Bimmer family lineup may be a dedicated "green" line of vehicles focused on high fuel economy and lower emissions. If so, the strategy would certainly make sense as it will enable BMW to meet tough environmental requirements without sacrificing too much of its performance-related DNA. BMW is one of a number of premium European brands likely to suffer most at the hands of recent U.S.--and proposed European--legislation to toughen emissions standards and fuel economy.
Last month's passage of legislation requiring increased fleet-wide fuel economy standards to an average of 35mpg by 2020 in the US was followed by confirmation from the European Commission that it had adopted a legislation proposal for emissions and fuel efficiency that requires all new cars to achieve a fleet average of 130 grams of CO2 per kilometer (as a point of comparison, the BMW 335i, by no means the biggest car in BMW's lineup, has a carbon output of 173 to 235 g/km and an average fuel economy of 20 mpg). According to the EC proposal, manufacturers can team up with other companies to meet the emissions target if they are unable to do so on their own, but it looks like BMW is considering building itself an in-house eco-brand to achieve this. The news is the latest in a series of examples we've seen of performance- and luxury European brands scrambling for a green solution, from Porsche's Cayenne and Panamera hybrids to Ferrari's Bio Fuel F430 and Mercedes' S300 Bluetec Hybrid.
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