The Green Show: Accessorize with solar panels

[ Background music ] >> Hey everyone I'm Mark Licea and this week we look at a new motion sensing TV, we get a charge with wearable solar panels and find out which toilet tissues rubs environmentalists the right way. The Green Show starts now. ^M00:00:14 [ Music ] ^M00:00:22 >> If you leave the TV running whether you're in the room or not there's a new motion sensing tele you should look into. ^M00:00:28 [ Music ] ^M00:00:31 [ Background music ] >> It's a Sony V-5 and it's got 3 truly unique features to it. The first one is this high efficiency back light found on HECCFL. The 52 inch TV uses over 65% less than what the EPA says qualifies a TV for energy star but we added 2 features in beyond that. The first one is a hard power switch and what that does is allows you to completely shut off the television so there's no vampire power. It's not drawing anything in standby but that's called the energy saving switch and it's on the right hand side of the TV. The final feature is what we're calling the presence sensor and what it does within in the range of normal viewing, about 9 feet, it will determine whether anybody's in the room and still watching a TV. If the TV says nobody's in the room what happens is the back light goes off which means an immediate power reduction of about 60%. You see the presence sensor saying nobody's there? So now the back light's off. Sound in still coming. When I remove this it will come on instantly. So if you hear touchdown pass or some big news that you want to go check out, run back into the room and the TV's gonna immediately sense that you're there and go back on instantly. >> Interested in making a solar powered fashion statement. The company Suntrica has wearable sun chargers. The solar badge and solar strap has their own rechargeable battery they're pocket sized, lightweight and bendable. You can also charge them via USB or a standard outlet to power handheld devices. They come with straps and attachments so you can even stretch solar wear on your geekiest fanny pack without shame. If you're not ready to sport that look just yet you can maybe start small with a sun powered Bluetooth speaker phone. David Carnoy has more. >> Hey Mark glad to be back on the Green Show I've got a little gadget for you today that is one of the better implementations of solar charging that we've seen. This is a Bluetooth speaker phone for your car that has a solar charging element. This particular model is made by Scosche and it's called the SolChat. The idea behind this is once you have the battery fully charged up yes you can initially charge it via your cigarette lighter adapter but when the sun is shining you affix this to your windshield and it'll trickle charge and keep that battery at full level. With the battery fully charged you get about 12 hours of talk time and about 450 hours of standby time and the device will automatically pair if you have your Bluetooth on when you walk in the car. And what's nice is once you walk away from your car the speaker phone will automatically disengage and turn off when the pairing is lost. >> The amount of e-waste will reach 73 million metric tons by 2015. Now the good news is that it could hit its peak and then the amount of e-waste would start to decline. That's the prediction of a new study by Pike research. It says within the next 6 years the worlds growing attention to e-waste dumping will push manufacturers and consumers to clean up their acts. Speaking of cleaning up Green Peace has a free app called tissue guide on iPhone and Android. It's a consumer guide to echo friendly toilet paper, tissues, and napkins. You can download the app at Greenpeace.org/tissueguide. One warning though some of the most popular and I'd venture to say softest brands are not on the recommended list. Ouch. And that's it for this week. Send your feed back in at Greenshow@cnet.com I'm Mark Licea thanks for watching.