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TreeHugger has already told us about how infrastructure designers in the Netherlands have decided that the country's highways need a major high-tech makeover and now those ideas are becoming reality. The Netherlands will start experimenting with photoluminescent paint on roads that charges in sunlight and then glows at night to denote lanes, traffic markers and even cold weather conditions.
The Smart Highway concept was designed by Studio Roosegaarde and infrastructure management group Heijmans. It won Best Future Concept at the Dutch Design Awards, but where concepts like these usually end there, this one is actually getting implemented this year.
The glow-in-the-dark paint at the center of the new roadway design is made with photo-luminising powder that will replace road markings. After being exposed to sunlight throughout the day, it then provides 10 hours of glow at night.
“It’s like the glow in the dark paint you and I had when we were children,” the designer behind the concept, Daan Roosegaarde, explained to Wired UK, “but we teamed up with a paint manufacturer and pushed the development. Now, it’s almost radioactive”.
The typical traffic markings will be painted on the roads, but the idea also includes plans for special painted snowflakes that will glow when temperatures drop and conditions could be icy. As a test of concept, a stretch of highway in the province of Branbant will be coated with the special weather-indicating paint in mid-2013.
The paint is just one part of the Smart Highway concept though. It also calls for some other smart road features, a couple we've covered before, like induction priority lanes that would charge electric vehicles as they drive over the road, interactive lights that switch on as cars pass and wind-powered lights that are planned to implemented in the next five years.
If you want to feel jealous of the Netherlands, you can watch a video of the concept below.
Dutch company Dykstra is designing a new iteration of sail-powered ship, using old sailing knowledge and new sailing technology. The Ecoliner Fair Winds has four massive 'automatic' sails that are moved by, in addition to the wind, software and satellite-based weather data that together calculate the optimal route for the ship when it is underway.
These means Ecoliner needs very little crew to sail, and also much less fossil fuels than a regular container ship. Ecoliner can still carry dozens of regular-sized containers.
Dykstra is planning an entire armada of these wind-assisted vessels. Fair Transport, the for-profit company that partnered with Dykstra to help design the Ecoliner, is out to reduce the use of regular container ships, which contribute a billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere annually.
Fair Transport's founders Andreas Lackner, Arjen van der Veen, and Jorne Langelaan have for three years been sailing an old brig, the Tres Hombres, to demonstrate that sustainable wind-powered shipping is possible. But the trio would also like to offer the shipping world a fleet of high-tech sailing ships that can carry dozens of industrial containers while being navigated by a slim crew, and reducing container ship pollution - in other words, be economically and environmentally sustainable.
Fair Transport hopes the higher cost of building this ship can be amortized over its 30-year lifetime via lower fuel costs.
The Ecoliner is estimated to have a top speed of 18 knots, and when speeds drop below 12 knots it needs the assistance of an electric motor. The Ecoliner is scheduled to be ready next year, in 2013.
I'm fortunate to have several passions in my life. I am absolutely an eco-nut. I am always trying to find new ways to reduce, reuse, recycle. We, as a species, have done more harm to this planet in the short time we have been here, than any other catastrophe or happening ever has. It's up to us to fix it.
I care about the environment whether it is as small as a single cell or as large as the universe.
I adore creativity and think we can all do more with much less. This earth has enough resources for us all to live comfortably if we all learn to share. Wasn't that a lesson we were supposed to learn in kindergarten?
I also love the bizarre, unusual, the weird and the strange. Be prepared for the odd "different" blog.
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