Category Archives: Sustainability
The Need for Solar in Rural Areas
A Voltaic customer from Brazil sends in photos from the Amazon region Cajutuba, outside of Santarém. The families that live here live in wood and palm leaf homes, plant mandioca (a native root) and also earn income by collecting the …
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Recycling Electronic Components
We store any and all electronics parts that we are unable to sell or give away to someone who finds it useful. We recently collected enough that it was time to find someone to recycle all the parts. We emailed …
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Flat Pack Booth at CES
We assembled our booth wall last Wednesday to show off our solar chargers and solar bags using our own cardboard shipping boxes and some plumbing materials we acquired at a store here in New York. We were able to ship …
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Materials Report: What’s in a Voltaic Backpack?
This report details the materials used and regulatory compliance for each component of one of our solar backpacks. When sourcing materials for our products, we look for ones with lower embedded energy and less toxicity than traditional materials without sacrificing …
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Greenpeace Rates Nokia Greenest Electronics Company
Greenpeace releases an annual report called the “Guide to Greener Electronics.” Nokia and Sony Ericsson do pretty well while Microsoft and Nintendo land at the bottom of the rankings. The report puts media attention on the sustainability practices of the …
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Location Based Services for Sharing
We’ve seen a lot of location based services form up around social media, but none of them seemed quite right for Voltaic. Thats until we found SnapGoods, located in our same office space in Brooklyn. They facilitate the lending and …
Rent my solar backpack
Adapters Slowly Standardizing
The move towards standardizing on Micro USB means that we all have to buy and carry fewer AC chargers. We don’t need to have a stock of ten different ones in our drawers. So who is slowing down the progress? …
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Frameless Design Reduces Panel Footprint
In our original bags, we slid each panel under an aluminum frame. This held the panel snug, but wasn’t the most efficient use of materials. In our newest line of products, we eliminated the frame and embedded the panels directly …
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Citizen Journalists Powered by Solar
Smallbean is down in Tanzania kicking off its’ Citizen Archivist Project and it seems that our Generator solar panels are working well to charge their electronics. Smallbean trains participants to document life in their communities, while at the same time …
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Solar Charging for Rural Entrepreneurs – World Cup Edition
There is an ongoing struggle to meet the energy demand in remote areas of the world. We haven’t seen that many good articles measuring the efficacy of different approaches to providing power to remote regions. This study conducted by Hajat …
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