{"id":1058,"date":"2010-03-07T23:15:57","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T12:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=1058"},"modified":"2010-03-07T23:19:57","modified_gmt":"2010-03-07T12:19:57","slug":"saving-the-world-13-grams-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=1058","title":{"rendered":"Saving the world, 13 grams at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Box<\/a>Universal studios sent me a bunch of Blu-ray discs recently. One of them is a movie of which I had never previously\u00a0heard. Called Home<\/a><\/em>, it is apparently an environmental documentary. From the blurb:<\/p>\n

In 200,000 years, humans have disrupted the fragile balance on which Earth was living for 4 billion years. Global warming, shortage of resources, endangered species: humans are jeopardizing their own living conditions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the very quick look I’ve had so far, it seems to have lots of glorious cinematography of different parts of the world, both natural and human made.<\/p>\n

(Tech info: the video is presented in 1080i50 format using the VC1 codec and enjoys a pretty healthy video bitrate of 26.8Mbps.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Now your eye may be drawn to that green oval on the front cover of the box. Mine was. What does it say? Well, there it is to the left.<\/p>\n

The packaging apparently assists with the salvation of the world.<\/p>\n

But how precisely does an ‘Eco-Box’ (TM, of course, mustn’t forget the trademark!) do that. Well, it invites us to see the back for details. And what does the back tell us? Let’s see:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Why, it tells us primarily that the box uses less material, is recyclable and, more importantly, results in a ‘20% reduction in carbon footprint compared to standard Blu-ray packaging.’<\/p>\n

So how do you reduce the carbon footprint by 20%? Perhaps by reducing materials by 20%. One way to do this is to leave holes in the product. A normal Blu-ray box consists of the hard transparent-but-blue plastic of the case itself, largely covered with a non-blue transparent thin plastic slip, under which is placed the paper sleeve.<\/p>\n

This box has sections missing from the hard blue case, as though it were a racing car where drilling out a few kilograms here or there could make the difference between winning or losing. Here’s the result: a regular Blu-ray case (from a Universal disc included in the same batch) on the left, and an Eco-Box (TM) on the right:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Normal<\/a><\/p>\n

This, and possibly the material changes, mean that the case as shown weighs 51 grams, whereas the other case weighs 64 grams. That weight saving comes to — to two significant figures — twenty per cent.<\/p>\n

I’m sure that will stop us from ‘jeopardizing\u00a0[our] own living conditions’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Universal studios sent me a bunch of Blu-ray discs recently. One of them is a movie of which I had never previously\u00a0heard. Called Home, it is apparently an environmental documentary. From the blurb: In 200,000 years, humans have disrupted the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,23,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}