You know that LED products have arrived ...

... when spammers put adverts for LED lanterns in your in-box!

LED lantern e-mail spam. (click to enlarge)

More media attention for new LED bulbs

Now that LED bulbs are coming on the market at something like reasonable prices, as I posted last month, everyone is jumping on the trend. A New York Times article, To Go Where Compact Fluorescents Cannot, reports that both general purpose and specialty bulbs are coming to Home Depot.

But by the end of this month, the 2,200 Home Depot stores around the United States will stock seven types, including two substitutes for the classic incandescent bulb.

And on cnet’s Green Tech blog, Martin LaMonica is ready to try something new. “I more or less ditched incandescent bulbs for more-efficient compact fluorescents in my house years ago,” he writes. “But at this point, I'm awfully close to ditching CFLs for the latest in lighting technology: LEDs.” LaMonica goes on to say that the biggest problem in LEDs — they heretofore only offered illumination in one direction — has been just about solved:

In the past year, though, lighting manufacturers have introduced LED bulbs in a shape Edison would recognize that put out a decent amount of good-quality light. They still don't give off light from all sides as incumbent technologies do, but this latest generation of LEDs does a better job dispersing light, which means that you could use one (or a few) for overhead lighting.

With Home Depot stocking these bulbs now, soon they’ll be in stores everywhere.

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Sept. 30 Update: On ZD Net, a columnist notes that these new LED bulbs are now available in Home Depot at an under $20 retail price.

The locavore trend, reductio ad absurdum edition

It may be the ultimate in vertical green retailing: a grocery store that grows its own produce on site. That's the idea behind a Danish proposal, reported in Discovery News:

The do-it-yourself grocery store concept called Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming to grow vegetables without soil ... Shoppers will come in and see all the produce growing on-site and point to what they want. Nutrients from fish in aquaculture tanks goes to feed the plants, and the whole place becomes an ecosystem.

And you can eat the food where it is grown, at a restaurant at the store — talk about a start-to-finish concept!