Green up your Crestron

Say you've got your Creston hooked up to all the lighting in your house. Say it's also tied in to the HVAC, curtains, or any combination of these. Then Agilewaves Resource Monitor will make such sense to you, you'll be surprised you didn't think of it first.

At the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit in early July, Sharp displayed a number of environmentally conscious designs, including a thin-film solar cell module and a 65-inch LCD TV that purportedly consumes half the power of current conventional LCDs.

The most interesting piece was a prototype of a 26-inch LCD TV that can be powered via traditional means or via a solar panel.

Greenpeace recently released the eighth edition of its “Guide to Greener Electronics,” in which the environmental group rates 18 companies’ green efforts on a scale of one to 10.

Not surprisingly, the group’s rating criteria is tough indeed, evaluating specific practices that are based on three fundamental questions.

Da-lite Delights in Being Green

When considering the environmental impact of various home theater products, projection screens probably aren’t the first category that we feel the need to discuss. Perhaps that’s because we tend to focus, first and foremost, on issues related to power consumption.

While energy efficiency is a hot topic, it’s not the only environmental issue that companies need to address. Recycling, the use of toxic chemicals, and air-quality issues are a few that come to mind.

Green Team

To help companies meet state recycling requirements, Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba have formed the Electronic Manufacturers Recycling Management Company, LLC (MRM).

With its mission to “bring electronics manufacturers and electronics recyclers together into long-term relationships that provide convenient recycling opportunities to consumers, MRM’s long-term goal is sustainable electronic product recycling.”

E-waste is everyone’s problem.

The impending arrival of the analog TV cutoff date has the environmental community worried that a flood of obsolete TVs will find their way into trash bins across the nation, contributing even more to the global problem of electronic waste.

The EPA estimates that, in 2007, Americans disposed of 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones, and computer products, with 82 percent ending up in the landfill.

But it doesn't have to.