Sustainability trends for 2012

Greener transportation

Hybrid cars is not a new thing but the latest improvements in the technology will be tuning these "underpowered toys for wealthy" to a more reasonable alternative to average consumers. The new lines of green cars are also increasing the competition as the American car makers are bringing ecological alternatives.

Lately the technology has experienced some serious enhancements too. What was criticized in the earliest hybrid cars for their low performance will soon be in the history. We only need to look into BMW i8 roadster concept and visualize where this might take the car industry in near future.

Also, various cities have improved their status and higher standards of living by paying more attention on steadily increasing their public transportation.

More fun with sharing stuff

In it's sustainable future technologies article, Mashable also mentions about Zipcar and Bixi. Both are facilitating the access to shared transportation systems.

A while back Sharable listed eight ways to share your stuff. That's about few of those thousands of ways of giving your stuff (or money) away for charity.

There are also ways to lend and rent your stuff to others - and sometimes earn a little money along the way. Rent Stuff lets you do exactly this. As well as Loanables and Rent Stuff Easy. These are quite U.S. centric but you can find same of services operating in all over the place by now.

Along with the rising costs of oil and the necessarily following need to start downscaling sooner than later, the eyes will be set to private car journeys.

According to SustainableCitiesCollective, 70% of these journeys are taken with a single person (check out their nice infograph). Many guess that this is going to be unacceptable in the future.

As with any service, Internet already (obviously) offers a solution for this. There are amazing ride sharing services out there, Carpooling being the biggest in the world.

Who's using these services anyways, you ask? In four years the number of registered users have gone up from less than one million to more than four million. By Carpooling shared trips have gone up from less than three million to almost eight million.

And these figures go out. We can only imagine what happens when trust increases along with introducing social and transparent features into these services.

Rise and shine of sustainable and ethical products

As competition is getting stronger, added value will be offered in more innovative ways.

For example the market share of fair trade bananas is getting bigger every year in many European countries - in Switzerland about half of the bananas are already fair trade.

Sustainable versions of many products that are offering practically the same characteristics are popping up all the time.

Want ethical wine? You got it. Beer? Yep. Did you know that green microbreweries are a hip thing nowadays? Well, they are. And they will be even more in the future.

One can find sustainable versions of different web services as well. In case of web hosting there are ecological services providers such as . And in case of web development there's Taombo (that's us!) that integrates social responsibility into the services of a typical creative agency.

In near future we will most likely find more and more innovative solutions where typical web services are making the planet earth a better place to live in.

Gamificating your life

Bringing the game addiction methods to make a world a better place has been a rising theme for some time - and it's probably that more of these innovative participation and cooperation methods will pop up during the next year.

We already have My Recycle Bank and My Energy where you can earn rewards by making smart decisions on your energy consumption.

And the guess is that there are still a lot of room for innovative ideas to integrate computer games and sustainability together some how.