Love this bench ad!

Standard Auto Wreckers suggested 10,000 Trees for the Rouge as the recipient of $10,000 in funding late last year and I noticed this awesome sign a while back and thought I would share.

Taiwan’s landmark skyscraper Taipei 101 may not be the tallest building in the world anymore but it is still trying to hold on to some of its notoriety by becoming the worlds tallest ‘green building’!  Taipei 101 applied for green building certification in October 2009 and should be certified in 18 months.

Taipei 101 spokesman Michael Liu said that the former world’s tallest building is still a masterpiece of technology. Liu said the huge steel damper inside the building that reduces swaying in high winds is a big draw to foreign tourists.

Liu said that visitors to the skyscraper’s observatory have increased by 30 percent in 2009 over the year before.  What happens if Dubai’s Burj Khalifa goes green?

Green fashion is in and the fashion show to prove it was held at Copenhagen’s Opera House — across the Danish capital from where delegates from 192 countries are gathered to hammer out an agreement aimed at stemming global warning — the display brought together 20 designers from five Nordic countries and representatives of such retailing heavyweights as H&M and Barneys.

Designers each presented two looks made from organic cottons and silks, polyesters made from recycled plastic bottles or new fabrics made from waste left over from industry and agriculture.

Never heard of Crabion? It’s made from byproducts from the crab industry. And Ingeo? It’s made out of corn scraps and can be made to mimic the smoothness of silk or the glossy sheen of PVC. Ditto, Milkfiber, which, you guessed it, is milled milk: from the powder left over from boiled milk, more precisely.

This is not one of those ideas where Coke is going green for St. Patricks Day or anything.  Coca-Cola has pledged it will eliminate a major greenhouse gas in its new vending machines and coolers, raising the bar for climate-friendly refrigeration in the food and beverage industry.

Coke’s Chief Executive Muhtar Kent said that the company, which sells everything from soda and juice drinks to water, will replace hydrofluorocarbon, also known as HFC, in its new vending machines and coolers by 2015.  While Coke’s 10 million vending machines, coolers and other refrigeration equipment around the world keep its drinks chilled, they also are the biggest contributor to the company’s carbon footprint.

To ramp up the transition to greener machines, Coke and its bottling partners will buy 150,000 units of HFC-free equipment in 2010, doubling the company’s current pace for buying the systems.  Coke has invested $50 million in research for climate friendly replacements. The company expects the move to greener equipment to cut its emissions by nearly 53 million metric tons–the equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road for a year–over the 10-year life-span of the equipment.

It seems carbon emissions reductions in large corporations is continuing to proliferate, which is great news!

Now here is a mini van nobody would be embarrassed to drive!

Imagine a world where gadets were powered by bio-batteries, you know – grab a mars bar and power your iPod for 6 hours by using some of the energy produced by your bodies?  That is exactly what Gizmodo has written about!

It turns out that the bio-batteries closest to reality at this time have a major problem with waste products. That waste is created as those particular batteries involve microbial yeast-based fuel cells that steal “some of the electrons produced when the yeast metabolizes glucose” in order to create a small current. While the entire process works just fine, the yeast cells are at risk unless the waste products are removed. We can’t exactly let the waste be dumped into the blood stream, so until there’s a some kind of cleaning process, the batteries are trouble as they either they die off or poison your bloodstream while trying to survive. I think this would be super cool but I hope we don’t end up like the Matrix!

There was an exciting event today at Standard Auto Wreckers where a check for $10,000 was donated to a fantastic local ‘green’ charity, 10,000 trees! The funds came from OARA where members of the association have agreed to pay an extra $20 per vehicle they acquire though the Retire your Ride car recycling program.

In the picture below  you see (from left to right) Ken Gold, Raymond Cho, Colin Creasey and David Gold.

I really loved this analogy, it is very pertinent to us here because we are currently working with about half a dozen auto recyclers, upgrading their websites.

A user won’t wrestle with your site. Web design, particularly navigation, is not the place to get clever. Web design should be no more complicated than book design. You might notice every book shares the exact same user interface. As do cars. As do bicycles. I have no idea how my car works. People have explained the workings of the internal combustion engine to me, and I nod sagely, but really, I don’t have a clue. Nor do I need to know. I just turn the key and hit the pedal. Your website design should ask nothing more of the user than a car does. Assume nothing, other than the user will point and click something obvious.

The ARA conference this year was a great success and a lot of fun for all those that attended.  With a tag line like “Experience the Horsepower Driving the Industry” most of us took the challenge quite seriously.

It seems the entries for Standard Auto Wreckers and Car-Part exchanged a few words before the big race.  Rumor is Green-Gold Thunder started talking smack first, whispering things like, “you look like you were born in a junkyard” and “get ready to eat my radioactive dust” – Car-Part High Octane replied with, “hey sissy, at least I don’t glow in the dark”.

In the end every horse that participated was a winner because all racing proceeds went to benefit charity!