Thursday, June 4, 2009

Eco-Friendly Gadgets for the Office

How green is your office? Do you recycle all of your paper? Do you avoid printing when you can? Well, if you're doing all of that, then you might like these green gadgets for your workplace, so that you can be even more eco-friendly!

Rather than use plastic pens, you could use pencils instead. However, rather than use a conventional pencil, Smencils are made from recycled newspaper, and they come in different flavours too! Some of the scents are pretty tasty, so as tempted as you might be to eat these smencils, I recommend you don't! The scents include Bubble Gum, Orange, Toasted Marshmallow, Chocolate, Strawberry, Pineapple, Raspberry and Apple. The only downside to these pencils is that they come in plastic tubes, which is not so green.

For when you do print out your documents, then the eco-stapler using a special cutting and folding technique to hold up to clip 3 pages together without using a metal staple. Admittedly, 3 pages is not a particularly large number of pages. However, I'm sure it'll just be a matter of time before more sophisticated stapler gadgets can fix together even more pages.

If you use a computer in the office, then you might be interested to know that you can get some really low power PCs now. The Aleutia E2 is a small PC around the size of 3 stacked CD cases, and incredibly it runs on just 8 Watts of power! Considering that modern PCs use around 250 to 400 Watts of power, that's a massive difference. It's not designed for processor-intensive work, but it's definitely suited to word processing, email and web browsing. You can even run it from a solar panel if you wish!

Even if you have an older-style computer, there are lots of things you can do to make it more energy efficient, such as using a low power hard drives. These low power variants can save up to 50% of the energy compared to conventional hard drives. There are other peripherals that are coming on to the market too, including energy saving PSUs (power supply units).

It just goes to show, eco-gadgets aren't all just tote bags and compost bins!

This article is a guest post written by Dan Harrison who writes about all kinds of green gadgets for EnviroGadget.com. You can read about energy saving gadgets, gizmos that save water, basically any kind of device that's good for the planet.

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