Green is the New Black

By Jake • July 1st, 2008 • View Comments

I’m sure that phrase has been used somewhere else, hopefully under Creative Commons.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the green movement has gone from non-existent to a hot-button topic seemingly overnight? The recent Tesla factory announcement has me thinking green lately.

I know it’s been around for decades; I’ve been recycling since the 80s. I used to go around collecting aluminum cans to take to the recycling center and use the money to buy baseball cards with the cardboard bubble gum in the pack.

I always liked the slogan, “think globally, act locally” since it always seemed like a grassroots (no pun intended) movement. Things have really changed in the last two years or so, as corporations jump on the green bandwagon.

I hope this is a good thing; it seems like it should be, even if it’s motivated by the other green, money. Because if it isn’t altruism, at least consumers are demanding green products, which has motivated producers into provided them.

Anyway, data centers present huge areas for green-provement. I’ve blogged in the past about greening up your blog. I’ve been trying to follow Jason’s tips.

I’m sure you’ve seen email signatures with pleas to consider the environment before printing the email. These make me chuckle; other people have a different viewpoint. It’s been a while since I sat in a corporate office, but I do recall seeing a lot of emails on the printer.

While we’re on printing, what’s the need for a print job separator anymore? These alone have to eat up reams of paper every day; sure, maybe 80-95% of them get recycled, but still, it seems wasteful.

About ten years ago, I remember a guy who went on a crusade to replace the bleached white coffee filters with the natural brown ones. I guess the bleach can seap into the coffee and can be toxic in landfills and to the water supply in general. All good reasons. Man, did he fight an uphill battle.

At the time it seemed a little crazy to fight that fight, but now, I’ll bet it would be a moot point.

No realy point here, just a stream of consciousness related to green. Add your thoughts in comments.


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  • Well, actually the 'green' signature is now
    http://www.oracle.com/dm/design/corp/misc/green...
    with the text 'Oracle is committed to developing practices and products that help protect the environment'
  • I borrowed the image in the post from TechCrunch. I have seen the new green signature, but it was a little small to capture.

    I wonder if using it makes my email greener.
  • I remember the first Earth Day, sitting in English class listening to the chattering and thinking "this could be good, but how much of it will wind up being hypocritical?"

    This morning I'm listening to the radio, and the dj is going on about the governator getting out of a new Dodge Challenger with the big Hemi and being hypocritical... (google if you haven't heard, yes, I'm envious).

    I can't help thinking of what will happen with all these hi-tech car batteries when they get old, or are defective - you thought exploding laptops were bad... not to mention all the extra energy used shipping them all around...

    And those effing flourescents... they're hazardous waste!

    But what really cheeses me off is the corporate hype. I won't even depress everyone with that rant. When it comes down to it, sustainability is what is important, and our basic economy is not built to support that, either locally or globally. Scarcity is the root of all economics, and now people are going, duh, we're going to run out of gallium...

    Hey, remember the paperless office?

    Speaking of colors, those tag clouds, could they imply a dimension of how recent the postings, with color of the tag indicating the date ordering? Red, someone's posted recently, blue old, etc.
  • Good points, sustainability chief among them. I hadn't thought about batteries, good point.

    I'm also a bit underwhelmed by all the hype cycles right now. We all know Detroit could have gone electric in the 80s if they had been sufficiently motivated.

    The internal combustion engine is the punch-card reader of technology. Seriously, car engines haven't even jumped to the mainframe era yet. Why? No motivation to advance.

    I'm not sure about the tag cloud. Because they aggregate all posts, time isn't a dimension. I've not seen a tag cloud applied to time. If you have an example, let me know, and I'll take a look.
  • Example? Maybe it would be a new idea! :-)
  • Hmm, you may be on to something. I think it would need a pager to show how the cloud changes over time, probably by month. Interesting idea. Maybe Matt Topper or Eddie Awad can hack something together using their PHP-fu.
  • Fineprint is a great piece of software that allows you to easily preview your printouts, delete pages you don't want printed, control double-sided printing, and print up to 8 pages per side of page. it even keeps track of the number of sheets you've saved.
  • Very cool. I rarely print much anymore, working from home and all, mostly boarding passes.

    The whole separator page thing is funny b/c I recall a few years ago when I was in an office, they went through a whole "duplex, it saves trees" thing, which was great. I always wondered why we couldn't also save trees by dumping the separator page.
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