College students just love a good competition, whether between dorm buildings, campus organizations, or rival schools. You probably remember homecoming float contests, intramural sports, and big games with the cross-state team. Since 2001, Recyclemania has tried to capture that spirit of campus competitiveness, and apply it to reducing waste at colleges and universities.

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Ever found it odd that, generally, you have to pay for recycling service? After all, the materials you place in those blue bins are commodities that your recycling service will sell. You might argue that paying people a cut of the revenues generated from the sale of such materials could work better to increase recycling rates (though, in fairness, the prices for such materials are relatively low… though they have been rising).

Philadelphia-based Recyclebank was founded on this concept. While the company doesn’t actually pay people for recycling, it offers a rewards program similar to airline miles or credit card points.

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Hummer horse carts, cheap(er) wind power, and make-you-own toilet paper machines… this week’s green tech finds.

• Sony adds to its green cred: The VAIO W Series laptop and Aspen phone both feature power saving and recycled materials. (via Stuff.tv)
  
  
• Trash to energy in Milwaukee: Developer Alliance Federated Energy announced Project Apollo, a trash-to-syngas project planned for the city’s North Side.
  
  

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Quickly: which company is greener? UPS or DHL? Stonyfield Farm or General Mills? Google or News Corp.? You may think all of these are no-brainers, but, in two of the three cases, your perception may not align with reality… at least in terms of action related to climate change. A new study, MapChange 2010, finds that, in many cases, there’s little alignment between real action by a company, and its “green” public perception.

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Architect Joseph Bellomo’s egg-shaped house.

Even though the average temperature in Haiti seldom dips below 75 degrees, building permanent shelter for survivors is imperative for obvious reasons. You’ve probably seen pictures of the tent cities that the estimated 1.5 million homeless are currently living in. So did San Francisco-based architect Jospeh Bellomo, who was working on a modular structure for a client in Hawaii when the hurricane hit. Built to withstand tropical storms with a foundation of only a few concrete blocks, Bellomo immediately thought his project could be a perfect solution for displaced Haitians.

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Sustainability advocates generally love the product service system model because, in theory, it reduces consumption, and provides the owners of the products with incentives to maintain those items for as long as possible. You may associate this business model with movie rental (Netflix) or car-sharing (Zipcar), but the types of products offered on a “rental” model continues to grow: designer handbags and dresses, for instance, are now available in this manner.

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Having worked at five different colleges and universities over the past 16 years, I’ve heard a lot of excuses from students who were late to class. The most frequent of those excuses, hands down: “I couldn’t find a place to park.” I’d hazard to guess that personal transportation (i.e. a car driven by a single person) is one of the biggest contributors to college and university greenhouse gas emissions.

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The head of the International Monetary Fund today proposed to create a multi-billion dollar Green Fund that would provide the financing that countries need to cope with climate change and move to a low-carbon growth model.

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President Barack Obama today announced that the federal government will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent by 2020.

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A bit of a weird, carnivorous motif running through this week’s green tech finds… check out the fly-eating clock, and nuclear wasted-eating material modeled on Venus fly traps…

• How green is the iPad? Apple has the spotlight this week with the launch of its new tablet computer. MNN and The Daily Green take a look at its green features.
  
  
• The Fly-Catching Clock: If common items like clocks and coffee tables could also catch pest (from flies to mice), and digest them into biofuel, would you find that revolutionary… or gross? British designers Jimmy Loizeau and James Auger created some designs along these lines to get people thinking about “using living things as fuel.”
  
  

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The U.S. Department of Energy announced today the formation of a blue ribbon commission to evaluate policy options for a safe, long-term solution to America’ growing piles of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from U.S. defense programs.

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