FreeCycling can be Fun!

Instead of throwing away those old beer bottles into the recycling bin and have it carted off every week, how about doing something creative with them, such as making a chandelier from them. Another creative project is to smash up the beer bottles and make a mosaic tile pattern for a floor or table top. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. This is called FreeCycling.

Remember those 3 R's: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle?

FreeCycling emphasizes the Reuse part of it. The great part of freecycling is that your materials are essentially FREE. And part of the joy is hunting for the right parts. If you don't have the right parts, then it means that you just need to be a little more creative in your ideas.

Here's an example. Let's say you want to build a table lamp that looks awesome yet is very cheap. You can either go to a recycling center and rummage through their stuff until you find an old broken lamp and called it a day, OR you can be creative and find parts that you could use to make a new lamp. Let's say that you found a few pieces of fire logs, hanger wire, cardboard paper, and that old broken lamp.

You could use a piece of fire log as the base, the hanger wire as the frame for the shade, cardboard paper for the lampshade, and then salvage parts of the broken lamp such as the electrical wiring, plug, switch and bulb encasing.

Put these all together and you can fashion a new lamp out of material that would've been thrown away in a landfill or recycled. Recycling is fine and all, but it costs money to recycle, and it uses energy to do so. FreeCycling is true recycling because it is free and it doesn't use energy.

If only we did a little more freecycling, what a better world we would live in.

Painting the Sun

A recent technological discovery will soon revolutionize the solar panel industry. It's called solar paint (or solar ink if you'd like to call it that way), and its literally a liquid solution of "silicon nanomaterial" which can be printed or painted on to any paintable surface.

One company leading the revolution is a California startup named Innovalight. The are printing this magical solar ink on paper rolls and laminating them into plastic panels. Innovalight's silicon nanomaterial is comprised of technologically proprietary "quantum dots" (sorry, that's all I can say because anything more is their trade secret) which can be varied in size (from 2 to 10 namometers). The variation in size can be used to fine tune whick spectrum of light can be absorbed, and hence can capture more light frequencies than traditional solar panels. This makes solar ink extremely efficient.

In addition, since the ink can be painted or printed, the overhead costs of creating a solar ink panel are remarkably cheaper than current solar panel construction. This makes solar ink panels considerably cheaper, faster to produce and much more attractive to the consumer.

I know I'm getting my hand (or my buckets) on this super solar ink when it hits the market for sure. Then I'm going to paint my entire house with this stuff. Oh, I can't wait!