Green Kiosks - Recycle please
I've been musing for some time now about kiosks and the ability to go Green. Last year, IBM announced that they were going to make their new IBM AnyPlace kiosks more Green and environmentally friendly. At first you think... it's a computer, how green could it be? Well, for starters they are using more recycled plastic, lower power consumption CPU's, no paints in their finishes, and processes that take less energy to produce parts. This is a good start towards green, I love it when a big corporation refines it's product and processes to be more efficient.
Another kiosk hardware vendor, Olea, has produced a kiosk enclosure out of sorghum plants. It was first shown at the NRF in Jan 2008 and again at KioskCom 2008. While not a production ready unit, it shows that it can be done. Their enclosure looked like a box made out of bamboo, but it was actually an engineered panel made from sorghum waste material. That is a great idea and our hats are off to Olea for engineering this enclosure. It shows it can be done, and gets our creative juices flowing about how to make a more environmentally friendly kiosk.
I guess when steel is required for security and durability in public spaces, we could try to use only recycled steel for our enclosures. But what about alternative material such as the laminated plant panels Olea created, is there a good green kiosk material we can use out there such as this? If you know of any good environmentally friendly materials that can be used structurally, pass on the idea. Perhaps we will build it. As I continue to muse about the topic, I wonder where I can go to learn more about green building materials? I suppose it would be the same trade shows that builders and architects attend? There must be a central place to locate these types of materials. I just have to hunt them down.
Other industries are using green materials to build their products, and I'd love to see some examples that may spark ideas for our kiosk industry. Readers, what have you seen out there? Does your company produce green materials? If so, comment below or email me your thoughts.
Another kiosk hardware vendor, Olea, has produced a kiosk enclosure out of sorghum plants. It was first shown at the NRF in Jan 2008 and again at KioskCom 2008. While not a production ready unit, it shows that it can be done. Their enclosure looked like a box made out of bamboo, but it was actually an engineered panel made from sorghum waste material. That is a great idea and our hats are off to Olea for engineering this enclosure. It shows it can be done, and gets our creative juices flowing about how to make a more environmentally friendly kiosk.I guess when steel is required for security and durability in public spaces, we could try to use only recycled steel for our enclosures. But what about alternative material such as the laminated plant panels Olea created, is there a good green kiosk material we can use out there such as this? If you know of any good environmentally friendly materials that can be used structurally, pass on the idea. Perhaps we will build it. As I continue to muse about the topic, I wonder where I can go to learn more about green building materials? I suppose it would be the same trade shows that builders and architects attend? There must be a central place to locate these types of materials. I just have to hunt them down.
Other industries are using green materials to build their products, and I'd love to see some examples that may spark ideas for our kiosk industry. Readers, what have you seen out there? Does your company produce green materials? If so, comment below or email me your thoughts.
posted by Tim @ 5:32 PM
3 Comments:
I don't think IBM or Olea efforts are so much about being green as much wanting to say "hey look it's green".
The AnyPlace typical is 40W it says and max 100w. I'm not sure how they do 40W with a 19" LCD? The sorghum kiosk has a pc and lcd rated at 300 watts?
Virtual terminals (RDP) use between 1W and 5W. Thin clients like Wyse with LCD are less than 20W.
On basis of energy consumption the IBM and Olea are not leading the pack here...
Real-life synopsis of enerygy consumption.
http://www.thinclient.org/archives/2007/08/faq_energy_usag.html
You are not comparing apples to apples. Thick client versus thin client... obviously, it comes down to how you are using the kiosk. Many software apps can be processor intensive and would not run on a thin client's lightweight processors. The new IBM's are a range from 40w to 100w due to different processors available including a dual core option and screen sizes from 15 to 19" LCD. So the 40w would likely be a 15" LCD with the base processor, base RAM, etc. Consider that the Anyplace is a line of kiosk products, not a single kiosk.
Our firm often uses thin clients to run digital signage content but it often lacks the ability to run interactive or video kiosk applications.
A new bit of promising technology is OLED which is organic LED technology, organic light emitting diode is still under initial development in Japan. See this link: DIGITALSIGNAGEASSOC which talks about it's use in Digital Signage.
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