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It’s a great time to be a person with big, green dreams, that beautiful spot between mass adoption and a growing movement where wild and crazy ideas have a wide audience thanks to the Internet.

Geekosystem has rounded up five fascinating green machines that get their cargo from point A to B with as much green flair as the mind can muster. Think any will eventually catch fire with the general public or will we look back one day and laugh?

Coffee powered car

While many of us use coffee to get going in the mornings, rarely has it been used in the gas tank of a car. However, a process called “gasification” makes it possible to run your car off of coffee grounds. This modified vehicle heats the refuse to a staggering 1,292º F. At this temperature, it releases a mixture of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane which is then burned in the engine normally…

Sky sail

…The company SkySails has already launched one ship, the 433-foot long MS Beluga SkySails, which has a 1,700 square foot kite. When flying, the enormous kite pulls the Beluga, reducing fuel consumption by an average of 15-20%.

So far, adoption of the SkySail scheme has been limited. However, the idea has started people thinking differently about how to move enormous amounts of cargo across the ocean. A competitor, KiteShip, is working on a 50,000 square-foot kite for oil tankers, and the University of Tokyo is looking into the possibility of using enormous, telescopic aluminum sails to catch the wind on oil tankers.

Full story at Geekosystem.

Traveling green.