Do you remember when SUVs were invented? At the time, they seemed like luxury apartments on wheels, with the stability of the large truck and the comfort of a swanky sedan.

That, of course, was before gas prices ballooned and the feverish wave of green-friendly living hit the country. Now, in terms of what’s “en vogue”, InventHelp’s Gadget Girl thinks compact is the new black!

The Honda Fit is a great example of a car that fun, functional and friendly to the environment. Until 2007, the Fit was sold only outside of the United States, but high fuel costs sparked Honda to release the Fit stateside.

InventHelp’s Gadget Girl got to test drive a friend’s Fit recently, and I was impressed by its stylish exterior, agile handling and precision steering. And although it’s a compact car, we were able to fit three adults, two bicycles and a cooler into the Fit without any trouble – thanks to a smart, easy-to-use folding seat design.

The Honda Fit suffers from the cons of most compact cars its size. Driving a Fit for a long period of time might be uncomfortable for someone of very tall stature, and the engine can sound a little “buzzy” at high speeds. Still, the Fit’s popularity proves that “compact” doesn’t need to equal “chintzy.”

Starting at around $14,500, the Honda Fit is an affordable, fuel-efficient and attractive vehicle. InventHelp’s Gadget Girl is certainly going to put this one on my list once new car time comes (but, when that might be is a whole other story)!

InventHelp’s Gadget Girl has learned a surprising statistic: nearly 7 percent of our daily fuel consumption in the U.S. is caused by vehicles that aren’t even moving. The culprit? Big rigs that sit idling while the drivers sleep inside the cab.

Drivers keep their trucks running while they sleep to keep the cabs at a comfortable temperature. Unfortunately, this practice is both inefficient and expensive. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that an average truck idles 2,400 hours per year. With today’s fuel costs hovering around $4 a gallon, that’s $9,600 in annual fuel costs.

Webasto Products has devised a solution that helps drivers to keep cool without emitting pollution or wasting fuel. Called BlueCool, the system involves a “black box” that sends refrigerant through a maze of graphite and a water/glycol mixture inside the box, creating blocks of ice. The device, mounted on the truck’s frame, uses only 3.5 to 10 amps from the truck’s battery, meaning there’s no danger of draining the battery. And it’s pollution-free.

Once the driver is ready to rest, he or she turns on an air handler that circulates coolant around the ice and blows cold air from the unit into the bunk area of the cab. The company estimates that the device can keep the cab cool for about 10 hours (which is a lot more sleep than this InventHelp employee gets each night)!

The company has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the pollution generated by trucks idling. Called Make a LEaP (Lowering Emissions and Particulates), the organization’s website aims to reduce oil consumption by featuring sobering statistics on fuel usage.

At a cost of $5,500 to install, the device seems like a good investment for long-haul truck drivers who want to keep cool AND do their part to reduce our dependency on oil.

You’ve heard of wind power and solar power, but what about wave power? InventHelp’s Gadget Girl has learned that the world’s first commercial wave power project has been inaugurated off the Portuguese coast.

Scottish engineering company Pelamis Wave Power Limited has invented the Pelamis Wave Energy Converters (PWEC), which is designed to harness the ocean’s massive energy to generate 2.25 megawatts of power.

Named for the sea snake Pelamis, each machine measures more than 450 feet long and 11-1/2 feet wide, and is partially submerged in the salt water of the sea. Hydraulic rams within the machine move up and down with the motion of the waves. This power is channeled along a system of reservoirs and eventually fed down to a cable on the sea bed. The cable then links back to a sub-station on shore where it is converted into useable electricity.

When the full array of 25 machines is in place, it is calculated that around 60,000 tons of CO2 will be displaced by this green-energy option. However, inventing a machine that’s durable enough to withstand the forceful power of the waves could prove to be a challenge in the long-term.

The immense power of the ocean is not news to anyone who’s ever turned their back on it, only to be clobbered by a huge, towering wave. InventHelp’s Gadget Girl is looking forward to seeing what’s next for wave power inventions!

As the evenings grow cooler and the warm summer sun is replaced by the gray overcast shade of fall, many people are pulling in the lawn furniture and hunkering down for cool weather. Well, people aren’t the only ones moving indoors as the season changes – bugs are migrating indoors, too.

InventHelp’s Gadget Girl can appreciate bugs for their usefulness in nature, but I can’t say I love it when I find one in my home! So, as the season changes I’ll occasionally remind myself why bugs are a crucial part of our ecosystem. Like this bacteria, for example, that can improve recycling!

Although billions of plastic bottles are made each year, few are ultimately recycled. This is because the recycling process simply converts the low value PET bottles into more PET, Kevin O’Connor at University College Dublin, Ireland told ABC News.

Scientists knew that heating PET in the absence of oxygen – a process called pyrolysis – breaks it down into terephthalic acid (TA) and a small amount of oil and gas. They also knew that some bacteria can grow and thrive on TA, and that other bacteria produce a high-value plastic PHA when stressed.

The ideal solution, they thought, would be to find bacteria that could both feed on TA and convert it into PHA.

After extensive research, bacterial alchemists found the Pseudomonas strains, which convert the low-grade PET plastic used in drinks bottles into a more valuable and biodegradable plastic called PHA.
The end goal, O’Connor said, “would be to use the new bacteria as just one part of a bio-refinery capable of upcycling an array of waste products in an environmentally friendly way.”

Stories like this help InventHelp’s Gadget Girl appreciate the diversity of life on our planet. Isn’t science wonderful?

Now that school is back in session and the great sales are over, it’s back to business as usual for students, teachers and the rest of academia. And even parents are done with the major school-supply crunch, InventHelp’s Gadget Girl knows from experience that school shopping is never over until the end of the year!

This week, a friend at InventHelp sought my advice for choosing the simplest of school supplies: the pencil. Is it better for the environment, she wondered, to purchase plastic or wooden pencils?

That’s a complicated question (although it doesn’t puzzle me as much as 10th grade geometry did!). Plastic pencils require a large amount of petroleum to produce and manufacture, and chances are they’ll end up in a landfill. True, they’re reusable, but what 5th grader do you know that can hang on to a pencil for more than a week?

Wooden pencils are better than plastic in that they’re made from a renewable resource, but trees still need to be cut down to produce them. Plus, in no time they’re shredded up into compost, meaning you need to replace them more often.

Luckily, InventHelp’s Gadget Girl found a new pencil invention that’s better for the environment than both plastic AND wood! Zebra® Jimnie® Clip Recycled Mechanical Pencils contain 72% post-recycled consumer content. The ingredient list includes car headlights and compact discs, plastic shopping bags and car battery encasements. Plus, it’s refillable for continued use!

Little Johnny may not be able to hang on to pencils in school, but I’ll defend this pencil from my fellow InventHelp co-workers any day of the week (you hear that, pencil thieves?)!

Even though going to the gym is great for our bodies, it’s not always great for the environment. Dozens of televisions dangle from the ceiling, electronic treadmills hum and all those sweaty towels certainly don’t wash themselves!

One gym in green-friendly Portland, Ore. is hoping to reduce our workouts’ carbon footprint on the Earth. We at InventHelp applaud the efforts of Portland’s Green Microgym, which is one of the first gyms in the country to use a four-person machine called Team Dynamo. The machine will harness the collective power of fitness enthusiasts as they pedal and turn hand cranks.

The total output of these green machines is modest but not insignificant. Plus, it’s great to get exercisers to associate working out with helping the environment. If larger health clubs catch on, there’s a good chance that the mere act of riding the bike could power the facility during busy times.

InventHelp’s Gadget Girl has pedaled more than a few miles on the old stationary bike, so why not pedal for power? If anything, I’ll feel a little less guilty about the looong, hot shower I take after my workout!

I’m lucky that I get to blog as InventHelp’s Gadget Girl because 1) I get to share with others my insatiable desire for all things electronic 2) blogging means that I don’t have to waste paper.

A career in communications has come a long way since 300-page company status reports and projector slides (as a company formed in the early 1980s, InventHelp definitely knows something about those!). As more and more offices move toward electronic documentation sharing, web-based human resources information and PowerPoint presentations, the direct benefit goes to the environment.

There are no hard statistics on how many sheets of paper a tree can produce (for obvious reasons, such as disparity in tree size and paper thickness), but it’s been estimated that an average pine tree could yield about more than 80,000 sheets of standard printer paper.

How many sheets of paper do you think your office has saved by moving toward electronic documentation? It may be more than you think, and that compounded with other offices moving in the same direction means that plenty of trees are being spared the ax each year.

Now, if you happen to work at a place where you’re still printing out every single thing, talk to your supervisor (if he or she is willing, of course!) about the move toward electronic documentation. One small move done by many can create big change, as we at InventHelp have certainly found out!