iPhone Apps Turned Green
- Posted by: Isis Krause
- on July 15, 2009 at 2:57 pm
I always cringe at environmental paradoxs: using plastic bags at the farmers market, buying organic produce grown in Chile, taking showers twice as long because you have a low-flow shower head, the list goes on.
But here’s one that I found oddly appealing: Green iPhone Apps. Yes there are plenty of rare minerals inside my iPhone and it consumes a lot of energy to charge, but perhaps that can somewhat be canceled out by one of these 10 enviro-centered apps.
I haven’t downloaded any yet, but these sound the most interesting:
greenMeter, $5.99
Here’s an app to track your car’s fuel and power usage characteristics and offer tips on how to save your wallet and the environment. Based on the gMeter vehicle performance app, greenMeter uses the device’s internal accelerometer to measure forward acceleration, compute engine power, fuel economy, fuel cost, carbon footprint and oil (barrels) consumption.
Carbon Tracker, Free
This GPS-enabled carbon footprint application allows users to calculate their carbon footprint from daily commuting, business trips or vacations. Users can also create goals for maximum emissions in a month, then monitors progress. Great for individuals, universities and large companies looking to lighten their carbon footprint.
iLocavore, Free
A locavore is someone who strives to eat food grown and produced locally. There are many reasons why people choose to live a locavore or Locallectual lifestyle: concerns about food miles traveled and the associated increase in carbon footprint, freshness of locally sourced food and the choice to support family farms, craftsmen, independent retailers and eateries to stimulate the local and regional economy.
The iLocavore application supplies this information from the Locallectual.com database to find area producers, independent retailers featuring local and domestic goods, and restaurants featuring local foods based on your current location
See all 10 Green iPhone Apps here. Please share any other green apps or ways to use your phone with the environment in mind.
DISCUSSION: 2 Comments
Ignorance is no longer bliss
This idea that an iphone app can assist you in being more environmentally responsible is really interesting. How can an application in a smartphone augment your real life? It will be interesting to see how the technology of Augmented reality applications will evolve and how living green will be incorporated into the new technology.
For more on the technology on augmented reality check out this GOOD blog post
http://www.good.is/post/better-choices-through-technology/
Great post, Isis. Eager to hear your thoughts when you’ve tried the apps, or why you ultimately do not try the apps. I have the Good Guide app on my iPhone. I haven’t used it much but like the idea of it and hope it gets better and important to use. (This too often seems to be the holding pattern for well intentioned tools.)Cliff’s piece – Sebastian, thanks for the tip – hones in on a key issue:”If you were to boil a number of social causes—from depleted
fisheries to carbon reduction—the central problem is that getting the
right information to consumers takes so much money and effort. And
consumers themselves have to spend too much time translating that new
information into action.”I am not a cheerleader for augmented reality — more a pendulum person — but it does seem like a useful step until robots become mainstream or our system of production and consumption becomes balanced within the threshold of nature, and we can thus make purchases without trashing the future. I ultimately want less moment to moment interaction with technology and hand held devices, so I hope the pendulum will swing back once things get better.