Brighter LED developments

Researchers at Purdue University have found ways to drastically reduce the cost of manufacturing LEDs by substituting the very expensive sapphire substrate layer with a much less expensive metal-coated silicon wafer. This could mean LEDs near the same price as incandescent bulbs within two years.

The cost of saving energy using FLBs

CNN has an interview with Ron Hui, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, on the environmental downside of using fluorescent light bulbs (FLB). It's about time the mainstream press started talking about this.

A Public Service Announcement

From Vampire Bear...just watch it.

Are plasma and LCD televisions destroying the environment?

TG Daily reports the findings of Michael Prather, a research scientist at UCLA. Apparently, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) a gas used in the production of plasma and LCD screens may be more than 17,000 times more powerful of a green house gas than carbon dioxide. Oh yeah, it's not covered by the Kyoto treaty either. Now what was it that was so bad about CRTs again...?

Hat tip to Mike Wall for the link.

Peak Metal

You may have heard of the concept of Peak Oil, the idea that there is a point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction will be reached, after which the rate of production will enter a terminal decline leading to a global energy crisis. This is obviously a problem for a petroleum based economy.

What is getting a lot less attention is the concept of Peak Metal, where by the finite resources of rare earth metals and even some of the more common metals used in electronics devices are being consumed at rates that will lead to depletion of these metals in less than 10 years.

I've often mused that the increasing demand for metals for electronics will lead to the mining of old landfills to get the copper and gold buried there from previous decades, looks like that might happen sooner than I realized.