Tag Archives: mit

MIT's plug-in Porsche

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In MIT’s electric Porsche, I could reach my in-law’s Cape home in 39 minutes, and still have some juice left to take the kids out for ice cream.

Students at MIT’s Electrochemical Laboratory have stuffed this 1976 Porsche (right) with batteries, and are limiting their experiments to MIT parking lots.

One MIT grad student says the Porsche consumes the electrical equivalent of 65 miles per gallon.

MIT student ingenuity plus high-tech batteries yields advanced all-electric Porsche – MIT News Office
With a click and a hum, the sleek Porsche 914 pulled away from the curb while onlookers watched anxiously and the passenger gazed down at a laptop plugged into the dashboard.

Why the drama? Once powered by a conventional gasoline engine, the 1976 Porsche now operates on 18 high-tech batteries–the result of work by dedicated MIT students and their mentors.

Rich leave the biggest CO2 footprints

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Before you blame yourself for not carrying your own grocery bag, it’s important to note that Bill Gate’s CO2 output (think private jets) is way bigger than yours. — mb

Leaving our mark – MIT News Office
The students conducted detailed interviews or made detailed estimates of the energy usage of 18 lifestyles, spanning the gamut from a vegetarian college student and a 5-year-old up to the ultrarich–Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates. The energy impact for the rich was estimated from published sources, while all the others were based on direct interviews. The average annual carbon dioxide emissions per person, they found, was 20 metric tons, compared to a world average of four tons.

Will RFID save the environment?

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Answer: No. The tags will leach toxic metals into landfills.

But that’s not dampening the RFID industry’s current greenwashing effort. RFID Journal, the most authoritative magazine in the business, is running a cover story this spring about how radio tracking tags can protect the environment.

The March/April piece, “The Green Technology,” picks up on RFID industry co-founder Kevin Ashton’s recent RFID-is-green column (below).

Ashton (Image: From Ashton’s Leigh Bureau bio) and RFID Journal editor Mark Roberti claim that RFID tags will help waste managers recycle paper and plastic.

The magazine’s cover story, however, only makes slight mention the waste disposal problems presented by the tags themselves–with their metal and toxic parts.

RFID’s Greener Side – RFID Journal
Recycling this waste is a hit-or-miss business. For example, it is both difficult and expensive to manually sort different kinds of plastic, so lots of it is either never recycled or recycled into a low-grade cocktail of mixed-up stuff that isn’t terribly useful. The same RFID tag that can reduce excess inventory can also identify what every package is made of, enabling the automated sorting of garbage. Once sorted, the waste material can be turned into raw material. And because plastics are made from oil, more recycling means saving energy—and maybe the planet in the process.