Today I had the pleasure of attending the Smart Car demo day in Arizona. Hosted at a Mercedes dealer, it was well done and the crowd of eager test drivers was larger than I anticipated.

In addition to several cars on display in the showroom, there were four available for test drives and my passenger was a well-informed Smart employee feeding me the key features while we went for a short cruise.

If you’ve never seen a Smart, they are tiny. Three feet shorter than a Mini Cooper. However, the passenger area is incredibly roomy (I’m 6’2 tall) and the seating position is elevated so your vantage point is much higher than you would assume. The demo cars were Euro-spec and we were told that the U.S. version will provide a smoother ride during acceleration.

According to a staffer, 22,000 have been pre-ordered and they should start arriving in late December or early January.

Overall, a great little car for scooting around town, easy to park, great mileage, and cheap.

Smart USA for more information.

With more than 350 cities vying for the title, Hastings, Nebraska has been named the winner of the Yahoo “Greenest City in America” contest. The city of Hastings will receive $250,000 for greening projects. The city had the option to take the cash or ten hybrid taxis. With only 24,000 residents, the fleet of taxis probably wouldn’t have been the best choice.

Top Ten Green Cities

• Hastings, Nebraska
• Pelzer, South Carolina
• San Carlos, California
• Mill Valley, California
• Topeka, Kansas
• Dover, Delaware
• Spring, Texas
• Lawrence, Kansas
• Walnut Creek, California
• Fairfax, Virginia

Yahoo press release.

Though Toyota current produces ten vehicles with an available hybrid engine, the Prius is the only model offered exclusively with a hybrid. However, according to the largest business daily in Japan, a new dedicated hybrid will be joining the lineup for 2009.

The new model is expected to be larger than the Prius and pack substantially more power.

Story from Business Week.

If MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Gather, and the other social sites aren’t fulfilling your green needs, head on over to Greenvoice. The site allows users to make as little or as much out of the community experience as you like. Simply visit to find relevant news about green issues or get completely involved by creating campaigns that bring attention to issues that you see as important.

Campaigns allow people to get involved in a particular cause by donating time and/or money. Some campaigns include lobbying software marketers to reduce packaging, buying local, and saving the Polish countryside.

Visit the Greenvoice website.

Soneva Fushi (Maldives) is in the midst of an aggressive initiative that will greatly reduce the environmental impact of its operations. The first phase calls for the property to be carbon neutral by 2008 and carbon free two years later. To reach carbon free status, the resort owners have partnered with a British consulting form to explore several plans to eliminate all fossil fuel use from the property.

The article details the extensive plans and they are quite impressive. You can find out more information about everything from the use of a biodiesel fleet of watercraft to using deep seawater from 300 meters below the surface to air condition guest rooms.

Article from Breaking Travel News.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has singed an executive order that will prohibit city departments from purchasing bottled water. The order goes into effect July 1^st and even includes the purchase of bottled water for water coolers.

The ban is meant to save tax payers money, eliminate the waste associated with bottling and transporting bottled water, and help to reduce the number of plastic bottles that end up in California landfills.

Story from CNN.

One of the great annoyances in office life for those who think green is the wasted paper that results from printing from the web. This is often due to poor formatting, excessive ads, or footers at the bottom that you don’t care about. Thanks to GreenPrint, this may be a thing of the past.

The GreenPrint software (available in consumer and enterprise versions) analyzes each document sent to the printer and strips out the unnecessary parts that often lead to an extra page being printed. As many web documents are printed to be read at a later time, GreenPrint has included a PDF creator in the software so that you can save the document rather than printing it out.

GreenPrint website.

Gatorade, a division of Pepsi, recently received LEED Gold certification for a 950,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Virginia. The plant is the largest facility in the world to achieve such certification.

Highlights of the plant include:

• Optimized use of water and wastewater treatment efficiency.
• State-of-the-art energy efficient equipment.
• Half of the facilities 135 acres will be returned to its natural state.
• Premiere parking for those who carpool, ride bikes, or carpool.

Story from IndustryWeek.

Investment banking behemoth Goldman Sachs has laid out five factors that are critical to the long term success of renewable energy.

1. Create renewable portfolio standards for utilities. This would require utilities to purchase a certain percentage of renewable energy as a portion of the overall energy mix. Standards would create a more reliable market where producers could sell their power.
2. Enforce the portfolio standards are that already in place.
3. Implement a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system for carbon.
4. Fossil fuel prices continue their meteoric rise.
5. The 2008 presidential election. Thus far, the Bush administration has resisted efforts to develop both carbon regulation and renewable portfolio standards.

Story from CNNMoney.

In the first major increase since 1989, the Senate has voted to approve an increase in the required fuel economy average from the current 27.5 MPG for cars, and 22.2 MPG for SUVs and small trucks, to 35MPG for the entire fleet.

The changes go into effect in the year 2020 and also require that half of a manufacturer’s vehicles are capable of running on E85 by 2015.

Story from CNN.