German firm DVD-D have launched ‘Einmal’, a disposable DVD format which is designed to facilitate DVD ‘rental’ from coffee shops, service stations and other such locations where movie rental was not previously possible. Retailing at around €3.99 ($6.44 /£3.20), the key feature of these discs is the fact that they are rendered unplayable 48 hours after opening, giving the customer all of the benefits of movie rental, without any of the annoyances such as returning the discs or incurring late fees.

The discs are standard DVDs with a self-destruct chemical coating applied, which reacts with the air once the disc is removed from its vacuum packaging. Once your allotted 48 hours have passed, you will be greeted with a ‘No Disc’ error on your dvd player, leaving you with two options - throw away the DVD, or gain a shiny new coaster for your coffee mug.

What seems to have been overlooked is the environmental impact of such discs. By their very nature these are discs which are designed to be thrown away at the end of their very short lifetime, undoubtedly adding to the landfill problem. The discs are designed to be recycled, but the number that are will no doubt make up a very small proportion of the total number of discs produced. The majority are clearly destined for landfill, and this is a problem. Added to that must be the cost, environmentally, of the production of these discs, and the environmental impact of the processes involved in recycling them. Even with a 100% recycle rate, we still see an environmental negative, as recycling is an energy intensive process which by its very nature creates pollutants.

This latest symbol of our over-determination to make everything disposable is a worrying one, and one which should be noted with caution. Here at How Ethical we can’t help but wonder, will they release ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in this format?

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. Cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Google have turned out the lights. Let’s do the same tonight.

No, actually, they’re not. Sevin Coskun’s entry to Treehugger’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition is remarkable in both it’s simplicity, fuctionality and message, but you have to wonder what would motivate someone to install a washing machine in their bathroom… or a toilet in their kitchen.

The Washup combines a washing machine with a toilet, with the grey water from the machine repurposed for flushing the loo. As the average toilet uses 8 litres of water per flush, and most people use the toilet an average of 35 times per week (according to USwitch), the water savings potential is huge.

Here at How Ethical! we can’t help but think it’s all a little impractical, and can’t see many people going out of their way to have this fitted, but the promotion of grey water reuse is commendable, and with a few design tweaks (like plumbing the components into different rooms!) this could be a winner! [via Treehugger]

Just a quick follow up to last week’s post on the Green Computing Debate hosted online by The Register.

The debate brought up some excellent points, and thankfully managed to (by and large) avoid cliche. Survey results presented by Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics showed that despite significant growth in eco-awareness, many businesses are still ignoring ecological concerns in their day to day work. Sadly, greenwashing is still prevalent in many workplaces, when a true greening of the business could be just as straightforward.

Representatives of both Dell and Intel showed what they are currently doing to ensure their product is the greenest of them all, and their future plans look very promising indeed, both concentrating on better power management systems. Albert Esser, of Dell, looked at why better power management systems are important, whilst Kevin O’Donovan of Intel explained how these systems might be implemented. All in all, they were two very promising presentations.

Tech kit gets old quick. We all know that. Louise Richards of Computer Aid International spent fifteen very interesting minutes looking at possible solutions to the endless cycle of buy-use-dump-replace. A highly recommended presentation.

The whole debate has been archived on The Register, so if you fancy taking a look, head over to The Register Green Computing Debate, and take in some of the presentations.

The traditionally incompatible worlds of computing and the green movement have, in recent years slowly started to sidle up to each other, and are set to become quite keen bedfellows. With everyone from IBM to Apple taking steps to green their organisation, and more and more people realising that those promoting the green cause may actually have a point, Green is clearly big business in the world of IT.

Against this backdrop of technological eco-awareness, The Register are running their first Green Computing Debate tonight (February 27th). It aims to “give you the chance to find out how the great Green rush is going to affect you”. You will have the opportunity to have your say about the movement, and find out what the options are for making your tech more eco-friendly.

The whole thing takes place online tonight at 6pm, and you can register for free here. Don’t worry if you can’t make it, we’ll be keeping an eye on the whole thing, and summarising the main findings tomorrow.