Japanese technology is pretty cool, guess what this is?

Looks like a motorcycle?

It is a tow truck?  Wonder how it has the power and stability to pull a big car, but I guess Japan has mostly small sized cars.

Auto parts city was once considered a menace in the community. But after greening up its act, it’s now earning top environmental awards — including Green Business of the Year from the Green Business League.

It may look like a junkyard, but brothers Jay and Larry Brosten hope to change your mind.

“We’ve spent too many years trying to improve our image and we’ve spent millions of dollars setting this facility up and trying to do the right thing,” said Larry Brosten. “But it’s always had the stigma of the ‘j-word’.”

The three-generation old Auto Parts City in Gurnee just got an $8 million make-over. The family’s goal is to set the green standard in auto recycling.

Good going guys! Keep up the green work! Congratulations to Auto Parts City from everyone here at GreenVehicleDisposal.com

read the entire article here

These guys from Maine are great for the future of eco-friendly fuel, I think.  They are the ones who became  online sensations by creating geysers from soda and Mentos candies have discovered it’s not just entertainment. It can propel vehicles, as well.

A contraption created by Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Buckfield using a bike and a trailer is powered by piston mechanism using hundreds of pieces of Mentos candy and Coke Zero.

On a video posted online Tuesday, the machine traveled more than 220 feet.

The video was directed by Rob Cohen of “The Fast and the Furious.” Grobe joked that the crew is calling it “The Fizzy and the Furious.”

The geyser experiment used Diet Coke. This time, the crew used Coke Zero. Afterward, they toasted their success by sipping Coke Zero from champagne glasses.

That the appliance surfers use to tap this energy is made from petroleum-based foam, polyester resins and chemically treated fiberglass has long been surfing’s quiet contradiction.

A broken board tossed in a landfill will take generations to biodegrade; the plastic fins probably never will. Even the thin strip of wood that runs down the middle to provide strength comes at an environmental cost — a minuscule yield from the raw material it’s milled from. “A ‘green surfboard’ is inherently an oxymoron at this point,” says Joey Santley, 44, a frenetic surfboard shaper and entrepreneur in San Clemente on a mission to create an environmentally friendly surfboard — or at least one with a carbon footprint that’s less titanic. “Hopefully in the future it won’t be.” In recent years, a wave of experimentation has sought to detoxify surfboards by using materials that suggest the Whole Earth catalog rather than the periodic table of elements: hemp, bamboo, kelp and silk instead of fiberglass; foam made from soy and sugar rather than polyurethane, which is composed of toluene diisocyanate, or TDI, a possible carcinogen that can be inhaled and absorbed through the skin; adhesive resins made from linseed, pine and vegetable oils. But changing the way surfboards are made has proved difficult. The few who have sought to go greener have struggled not only with finding just the right materials but also with overcoming resistance from shapers and professional surfers reluctant to fix what they don’t consider broken.

After experimenting with castor oil, sugar and corn, McMahon’s company found that blanks made with soybean oil were as strong and light as conventional foam.

Two years ago, he and a partner formed Green Foam Blanks, which makes rigid foam surfboard cores by fusing polyurethane with recycled polyurethane dust gathered from workshops that would otherwise discard it. That yields more boards per ounce of toxic polyurethane.

The company recently signed a deal with a leading maker of traditional blanks to manufacture and distribute its product in North America, Japan, Europe and Costa Rica. Still, this being a start-up, Santley is not just part-owner, he’s also the chief dust collector. Darting down a gangway between two nondescript buildings recently, he bounds up the stairs of one of the neighborhood’s numerous surfboard factories. Under a whirring cutting machine, he hits gold: a pile of white polyurethane foam shavings as light as Rocky Mountain snow. “This is like a perfect powder day,” Santley says, shoveling the stuff into a trash bag and holding it aloft. “Probably enough for about a dozen boards. And it won’t end up in the landfill.”

Hat’s off to you Joey and we hope your quest for a green surfboard is successful!

Mike Anton – read the full article