The Greener Truth » inventions

A Bendable Bike

Aaron Midgett — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:55:26 +0000

I am alsways looking for new ideas that will make greener forms of transportation easier and last week I found a great one. This may seem like an odd concept, but in big cities, where bikes locked with massive chains routinely dissapear, what better way to keep your bike from being stolen than to use it as the lock. Now, I am not too sure how this works, or how well it rides, but the idea behind this bendable bike is genius. Kevin Scott’s bike simply bends around a post and the two wheels and the frame can all be locked together with a U lock. In order to make the bike bendable when needed and stable when being ridden, a crank tightens a cable inside the frame. The next step will be to incorporate the lock so that the bike can just lock to itself. But for now, what a cool invention.

The Starbucks Karma Cup

Aaron Midgett — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:49:10 +0000

I have railed on Starbucks (and all the other coffee stores) in that past over all of the wasted paper coffee cups, but after a long time coming, the company has joined with the Betacup program and decided to make some improvements. The Betacup program initially asked for sugestions from customers on how to fight the coffee cup waste. Here is a video explaining the problem and how to find the solution.
Now the winning idea has been chosen, and it is a brilliant one. Instead of redesigning the reusable coffee mug, the solution was simply to give folks an incentive to remember their mug. Every coffee addict that I know has multiple reusable mugs, but I don’t often see them being used. Reusable mugs are hard to clean and easy to forget, so to help people remember, the Karma cup idea will reward every tenth customer bringing a reusable mug with a free cup of coffee. This is so much smarter than a punch card, or a discount, because you never know when you are going to be a winner, so you always have to be on your toes and bring your mug. The only addition that I would make would be mug cleaning station. How many times have you had a reusable mug, wanted to use it, but just couldn’t stomach drinking out of the same cup for another day without washing it? So now, what if Starbucks had a quick wash station so that while you were waiting in line, you could wash out and sanitize your mug? Now that would be convenient, and with the addition of the Karma cup idea, could change some attitudes about coffee.

More information on Betacup and the coffee cup problem

-Betacup: Check out these other great solutions

-Treehugger

-Coffee Waste Calculator

-Sustainability is Sexy

Mentos and Coke for Transportation?

Aaron Midgett — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:15:43 +0000

Well this certainly is not going to be the transportation of the future, and it certainly is not good for the environment with all those plastic bottles and carbon dioxide released, but I like the creativity and the out of the box thinking. You have seen the original mentos and diet coke synphony, but check out what Eepy Bird Productions can do with Coke Zero.
I am in no way suggesting that we look into mentos and coke as a form of travel, but I don’t know that I will be eating the two together either. Sort of a cool idea, and the kind of ingenious thinking that we need more of. If you are interested in how this works, take a look at the MythBusters explanation about how this reaction happens.

More information on Coke and Mentos

-Eepy Bird Productions

-MythBusters

-Wikipedia