LED Blog: LED Lighting And All Things Green

Those crazy Germans.

Rather than using fossil fuels to create electricity and use the electricity to create light, the town of Dusseldorf has for many years, skipped that unneeded step and burned the gas directly in lamps to create light. I don’t know exactly how much light gas lamps can produce, but that’s probably a lot of extra carbon being pumped into the air.

The municipal power utility is trying out a new plan to replace all their gas lamps with LED lights. Of the 17,000 gas lamps in the city, about 10,000 will be replaced with LED spotlight bulbs.

So far only two dozen have been replaced as a test and people are already unhappy saying the light is rather cold (did you see the pun?). Ulrich Kuiper, who developed the lamps says that he will use warmer LED colors (there’s the pun again) for future lamps. My question would be “How all those Germans will be able to light their cigars at night when they forget their lighter?” But I guess eventually LEDs will be hot enough to do that too. Just kidding. LED’s don’t get that hot.

[Via The Economist]

Awww...they make plants now.

My boy Sammy is really making some new ground this past year or so moving into new markets with its fuel cells, iPhone-clones, and more recently, netbooks. I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon they started making LED lights as well! Now beginning Oct 1st, they’re foraying into the new current hotness trend that’s taking over western civilization - GREEN CONSUMERISM! With all the new products they’re creating, they must be running out of raw materials right? Where do we get more? From OLD materials! I do applaud them for making the effort and it does make sense I suppose with this new scheme they’re calling Recycling Direct. Unfortunately, this helps but a small subset of consumers, namely the ones that bought Samsung’s products to begin with as that is the only type they will accept for free (there is a fee for other brands). I can see the conversation going like this :

“Hi, I’d like to recycle my old cell phone.”

“Is it a Samsung?”

“No, it’s a Nokia.”

“So?”

“You will have to pay a fee for us to take Non-Samsung products.”

“Oh ok. I’ll just recycle it into this garbage can here. I don’t think it will charge me anything.”

Oh well. I guess you can’t win them all. There will be fixed dropoff points in all 50 states that coincide with other recycling programs in the area. Now get out there and buy Samsung!

BONUS : Did you know you can mine bars of gold out of old cell phones?

[Recycling Direct Via Crave]