A word on sustainable design

I visited the Greener Gadgets conference on Friday and attended the panel on new forms of mobile renewable energy. Among the presenters, one talked about a mini-windmill you could strap on your arm to charge your cellphone and another spoke of longer-life laptop battery.

To get the windmill to charge your cellphone for a whopping, um, four minutes of talk-time, according to the HYmini webpage, you need 20 minutes of a steady 19 mph wind. You get the wind, say, by attaching it to your bike handlebars or wearing it on your arm when you go snowboarding.

On the other hand, Boston Power's seemingly more boring and conventional lithium ion battery, newly introduced and dubbed the "Sonata," does nothing more revolutionary than last for three years and charge quickly.

Which is the greener product? You got a windmill and a laptop accessory. A no-brainer, right?

But here's the thing. The mini-windmill, when it comes down to it, is essentially a toy that does not replace but is bought in addition to the regular plug-in cellphone charger. And the fate of this impractical gadget will more than likely be its owner's desk drawer, not a place we want to be storing precious planetary resources.

The long life of the Boston Power battery, on the other hand, depending on usage, allows it to replace two or three conventional laptop batteries. The durability of the Sonata means less toxicity, less metal pollution and less resource use, something that is good for the planet and something that customers already want.

The point is that if your goal is to truly create a truly sustainable product, make sure you are leveraging consumer demand to create green practices, not leveraging ostensible green practices to create consumer demand.

Comments

[Brian Foust]

Great observation! In an attempt to be greener we could be just buying more stuff.

[Julie, writer surefirewealth.com]

I guess a lot of people into green marketing and green inventions often make that mistake. Understandable. After all, there was a time when people didn't really pay attention to plastic bags and non-plastic bags. It's like they're trying to help garner interest by providing something green for the consumers actually want. I don't necessarily think this method is useless if the product itself can really produce significant effects.

But maybe they can do something a bit better, a bit more lasting and actually useful for long-term rather than something that just might inconvenience the consumers.

[Laura]

To finish the trend of scaling down wind power to a personal level, someone had to go this small just so we would realize how pointless it is. Wind power is great at the institutional or even residential scales, but it likes a steady breeze, something we humans try to avoid unless we happen to be snowboarding. Having a charger the size of an anemometer will probably be no more an an expensive way to discover if it's windy, and I already have a weather rock.

[Greenpa]

Another aspect here- there are some pretty predatory invention "developers" out there, who really don't care much about any genuine value of an invention. And some inventors who can be astonishingly naive - about markets, fees, and physics.

So the developer has an inventor come in filled with enthusiasm- figures out how they can make a bit of money bringing this gimcrack to market - and bingo; you have another useless plastic do-funny. There does seem to be a vast market for people who will by a useless do-funny - once.

[Anne]

Also funny that you mention strapping the wind generator to a bike, when strapping a dc motor from a broken child's toy to the same bike can make a AA charger, and those can then be used in a number of products. (This is actually a project to build an iPod charger, but you can get an idea here: http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/511)

I feel a song coming on...

Question the new stuff
And hack the old
One is silver
The other's gold...

[arduous]

There's a store by me that sells "green" stuff, and a lot of it is like the little windmill. For example, the environmentally friendly bamboo cutting boards. Fine, if you don't own a cutting board, but seriously, who doesn't already own one? So if you do, there's no sense in going out and buying a bamboo cutting board to be "eco-friendly." Just use the one you already own.

[Jennifer]

I like how this riffs on the conversation you posted last week... Since the other alternative is, of course, not owning a cell phone/i-pod/laptop in the first place.

[Leila]

Longevity is definitely important, in addition to energy efficiency. Most appliances have an energy rating, but you kinda have to use your intuition or read reviews to gauge the durability factor.

[CindyW]

Interesting. The windmill charger is either someone's garage project (hey, check this out, isn't it cool?) or yet another greenwash product. There is a recent article on Harvard Business Review (by Steve Bishop of IDEO). I think he makes a very valid point about green products and their marketing: For a company that wants to go green, don't focus on the green niche market. "Consumers—whether they are green or mainstream—don't simply want green products, they want solutions to their day-to-day problems that also make sense for our environment." People who buy drills don't need drills; they need holes.

[heather t]

And what is this little gadget made of? Looks like plastic. Hmm.

[vegetablej]

How about a solar cell on a stand or mount that can easily be hooked up to a re-chargeable battery charger? Or a solar cell that can be put somewhere easily and hooked up to a machine with a plug?

I want cheaper and more readily available and efficient renewable energy sources that really work. And that are so available that you trip over them in the stores, so that they become the norm, not pretty toys that do nothing much but make people feel cool for like 5 minutes.

[Angela]

Please tell this to the people at Ideal Bite! They send out regular emails with "green tips," but sometimes it seems like more of a shopping catelogue.
Today's includes all those gadgets you speak of.