On July 20th, Energy Star’s new specs for computers went into effect. While some product lines of all manufacturers fall short of these new standards, a few do comply – except for Apple which does not have a single item in compliance.

Only about 125 computers meet the new requirements and can be seen here in Excel spreadsheet format.

Dell has three on the list, Lenovo and Gateway have the most so far, and Apple has none. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Western Digital is entering the green arena of hard drives with its GreenPower initiative. Desktop, enterprise, CE and external hard drives are all included in sizes from 320GB to 1TB, and all allegedly will use 40% less energy.

The first to hit the market will be Western Digital’s 1TB Caviar as a WD My Book external drive later this month.

A breakthrough technology developed by three engineering lads in Wales could hold the key to converting carbon emissions into beneficial substances such as biodiesel, methane gas, and fertilizer. The cleverly-dubbed Greenbox was designed to be fixed underneath one’s vehicle where it could gobble up carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide until the next fill up, at which point the box would be switched out for a new one while the filled canister headed to a bioreactor for processing. Sounds complicated, we know, but strapping these bad boys beneath every gasoline-powered vehicle in a given nation could boost its biofuel production exponentially — all without spending another penny (or pence) on research. Unsurprisingly, the trio of inventors are staying mum until they (hopefully) convince the government or a private company to grab ahold, but unless these boxes learn to swap themselves, we can’t imagine too many individuals bustin’ out the creeper for underbody work at each fuel stop.

[Thanks, Jamie]

New "Greenbox" technology was developed by organic chemist Derek Palmer and engineers Ian Houston and John Jones and they may have come up with a solution to the problem of carbon emissions with a box to be used in place of a car’s exhaust and would trap the gases including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, and then emit mostly water vapor.

"We’ve managed to develop a way to successfully capture a majority of the emissions from the dirtiest motor we could find," Palmer, who has consulted for organizations including the World Health Organisation and GlaxoSmithKline, told Reuters.

Apparently these guys came with the idea while trying with to increase algae growth for fish farming with carbon dioxide.

As posted right here, Taiwan is allocating $7 million to convert 420,000 traffic lights to the LED standard. Not to be outdone, Seville (Spain) is planning to replace its halogen and incandescent traffic lights with LEDs. The price tag is estimated to be €2.3 million, but it will conserve 85% of the energy used now.