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Greening the Times Square Ritual?


Last year, the famous dropping ball at Times Square went "green" by switching to LED lights. This year, as the Times' James Kanter pointed out the other day, they decided to supersize the thing, and keep it glowing all year round. Now, I'm no math genius, but doubling the ball's size and increasing its glow time by a factor of 365 hardly sounds like a good way to conserve energy. Right?Also commemorating the "greening" of NYE on 42nd Street are these new wind-powered billboards, and the tourists-on-bikes-powered 2009 signs that we read about over at Wired. Sounds greenwashy to me, but we'll see.In the mean time, I'd like to know what the city's plans are for the 1,000 balloons that will be left behind when a million-plus people decide go home for the night, to say nothing of the (literal) ton of confetti that will rain from the rooftops a couple minutes before the ball drops.

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