“There is a great interest in bringing sustainable concepts into our daily lives,” said Dalshad Ismael, director of engineering projects at the Kurdish Ministry of Higher Education, during a session on buildings of the future at a Portland community center this week.

“People may not understand it as such,” he added, “but they know we must protect what resources we have.”

Several participants said that the concept of sustainability is not new to Iraq, but years of warfare have meant that it is rarely put into practice.

The meetings could lead to what the visiting academics hope will be their country’s first major sustainability effort.

The trip was funded by the Michael Scott Mater Foundation, with assistance from Oregon State University, the University of Oregon and Portland State University as well as support from the United States Department of State. The 19 professors, lecturers and deans come mainly from schools of engineering in Iraq.

Read more from the New York Times.

The clever proprietor has doctored up the fitness club’s spin bikes with weed whacker motors and truck alternators so that patrons can create energy to help power the 2,800-foot space.

The opening of The Green Microgym coincides with the announcement of M2E’s kinetic charger, which can generate energy from motion. The kinetic energy system uses the Faraday Principle, which states that the movement of a conductor through a magnetic field produces voltage in the conductor proportional to the speed of the movement. In this case, the conductor is a wire coil.

The system uses a magnet that moves against the coil every time the charger moves, generating a charge that is captured in a capacitor. A logic circuit takes the charge to the built-in Li-Ion cell, where it is stored until use.

Boesel expects patrons to power only a quarter of the gym’s power at first, but after he equips the elliptical trainers with similar motors, he hopes that the energy supply will become entirely self-sufficient.  

Read more at CleanTechnica.com here and here.