environment

There are many online calculators for assessing how your lifestyle pollutes the planet; environmental nonprofits sponsor most of them, such as the Earth Day Network's Ecological Footprint Quiz. But learning about the downstream effects of your driving, computing, and shopping can give you guilt to last. Once you feel like the sky is falling, what are you supposed to do about it?

Entrepreneurs bent on spreading sustainability have created Web sites to capitalize on either your guilt, survival instinct, or nobility--whatever the personal motivation may be--by letting you examine the ecological impact of your way of life. Then, you … Read more

In the market for a laptop bag made of recycled soda bottles or a solar-powered iPod charger? You could spend hours searching online for boutiques that stock those green goods. Or you could go straight to Five Limes, a social-shopping site linking to stores that hawk ecofriendly products, such as Green Home for nontoxic bedding, BTC Elements for organic blue jeans, and Green Office for recycled-paper Post-Its. Five Limes is "something like an Angie's List for green products," as Sustainablog puts it. Five Limes saves a history of your activities to tailor search results accordingly and to … Read more

I'm one of those wannabe Luddites who doesn't even own an iPod. I nearly scoff whenever I spy those telltale white strings dangling from ADHD-afflicted ears around town. Nor do I use any other MP3 player in public; the ambient sounds of belching engines and Super Mario Bros ring tones are street music to these ears. But if I did have an iPod Nano 1.0, I'd probably get one of these $15 recycled plastic Jimi cases. The U.S.-made, polypropylene and polycarbonate Jimis come in red, blue, clear, and orange flavors. You can keep … Read more

As kids, some people (none of us here at Crave, of course) licked batteries to experience a little jolt. Turns out that old pastime could now have a practical application--producing battery power. A Japanese inventor is developing a battery, made mainly of carbon-based compounds, that's activated by a single drop of water. Susumu Suzuki describes his device in a video interview with Reuters.

This eco-friendly energy source--which has an electric current as powerful as that of a standard manganese dioxide battery, its creator says--would be cheap to produce and could be recycled several times. Most notably, it could potentially … Read more

I was psyched when a reader said this little box can show in dollars and kilowatt-hours just how much every last lightbulb, TV, and forgotten camera charger in your house costs you. The Energy Detective, or TED, will flash an alarm when your hourly or monthly power consumption reaches painfully expensive levels, and when spells of high or low voltage might damage connected gear.

At $150, TED costs the same as the Kill-a-Watt and its ilk, which can measure only one gadget's power hunger at a time. You could recoup that cost in a tax refund and then some, … Read more

To go on a proper energy diet, first you'd have to measure the power consumed around the house, outlet by outlet. Just like counting calories, that would take all the fun out of gobbling up electricity. But if you're really geeked about saving money and greening your home, then you might follow the lead of one Silicon Valley engineer who crusaded around his apartment with the Kill-a-Watt energy meter, measuring the appetite of nearly every appliance.

Eric Boyd calculated that over a year, his refrigerator, desktop PC, and iMac used the most electricity. He estimated that his stove, … Read more