Egglings

Need a funky hostess gift or party favor? Try the Eggling!

Japanese entrepreneurs bested the frequently moldy Chia pet with their Eggling creation.  Molds create shell-thin porcelain eggs that have been filled with soil and seeds.  Cracking the eggling much like a soft boiled egg provides you with an instant flower or herb pot, with the broken “shell” placed into the pot to decompose.  Sunlight and regular waterings will keep this product growing and thriving for up to 5 months within the shell before needing repotting.

I want one, don’t you?

Dry Ink and its environmental impact

I went to Wired NextFest over the weekend and was able to see a number of awesome products I’ll write about here.

Xerox representatives were on site demonstrating the quality of their 8560 Dry Ink Printer. Their dry ink printer generates 90% less waste than laser printers. Looking at the waste generated by heavy printing (if you work in a paper heavy office like I did, we’re talking 1000s of pages of printing per person each day), Xerox has managed to cut throwaway waste down to 5 lbs for 100,000 printed pages versus the 157 lbs of wasted generated by laser printers. Huge difference wouldn’t you say?

Currently, the dry ink printers are part of a unique Xerox Line. Hopefully, they will eventually make the dry ink aspect standard across all printers a few years from now given the environmental impact printers have on our planet. Cartridge-refill company Cartridge World offers one way to cut back on printer waste, by allowing you send in your cartridges for re-filling and purchase the refurbished printer cartridges for about half the cost of a brand new one, saving them from the landfill. Interesting facts available on their website include:

1)In North America alone, over 350 million cartridges per year are discarded in our landfills, and that number increases by 12 percent annually!

2) A laser cartridge thrown into landfill can take up to 450 years to decompose. Some components made of industrial grade plastics will take over a thousand years to decompose.

3) 70 percent of used printer cartridges throughout the world are currently being thrown out.

4) Almost 8 cartridges are thrown away per second in the United States alone!

If you’re looking to upgrade and do your part to minimize landfill waste, the Xerox printer itself will run you $700, with 3-cartridge packs costing about $100 apiece. You can expect roughly 1000 printed sheets per cartridge.  Click here before October 31st to enter the Xerox raffle for a dry ink printer!

If that price is too steep, like it is for me, you can consistently recycle your used printer cartridges through companies like Enviro Solutions, which will ship you pre-paid postage mailers to send your cartridges to them.

If you want to earn some money for yourself, your company, or charity, you can enroll with FundingFactory and be refunded for each printer cartridge or cell phone turned in. Funding Factory would likely be a great way to raise some extra funds for school districts across the country if students were encouraged to bring in their households’ used cartridges.

Federal Debt and the Value of a Dollar

Happy News to start your Monday…not so much.

I’ve long claimed the job of Republicans is to drive us into debt, in order to provide a job for Democrats: balancing the budget. Yes, I’m just judging a group that puts corporate interests ahead of people. I don’t think Democrats are that great either, they’ve got their own set of special interests; they’re just the lesser of 2 evils.

In the next administration, Democrats (who would really vote for a Bush tapped administration at this point?) will have their work cut out for them.

Hale Stewart’s article “Economy: The Next President is Already Screwed” shows us why. We’ve gone from $5.8 billion of debt (August 2001) to $9.0 billion today. But that’s not daunting enough. The value of the dollar has plummeted — the rest of the world doesn’t have as much faith in us as good ole’ boy G.W. — to the lowest it’s been in 35 years.

I don’t think Middle America has anything left to give. Maybe Howard Gardner is right and it is time for a maximum wage, freeing up a lot of money to clear debt and solve social issues in the US.