Last night Finnish energy company St1 launched ReFuel, their new biofuel product. ReFuel is interesting in the sense that it is produced from biowaste, and so no farmland is used in its production.

To support the product launch we helped to create ReFuel Tehdas, an application for converting internet trash (bad pictures, advertisement banners) into money. To use it, you install a Firefox 3 extension with which you can then flag images as garbage:

The image will then be sent to our garbage processor, which churns it into money for your account. You can claim some of the money by ordering a St1 Visa card. Other users of the extension can see what has been already processed, as all garbage images are automatically blanked out from their respective websites:

This makes browsing even the noisiest websites a serene experience, as dutiful ReFuel users have probably already removed most of the obnoxious blinking banner ads.

Watching images pop into the garbage processor is also quite addictive, and gives an interesting insight into the dark subconscious of the Internet.

To try it out, register to the site or watch the screencast.

Technically the site is also quite interesting:

It uses the new Midgard2 platform, combining the PHP-based Midgard MVC framework with some Midgard-Python processing tools. It also utilizes Facebook Connect for easy registration, and is probably one of the first campaign websites out there to be based on Firefox extensions.

Much of the platform is same as what the Qaiku microblogging service uses.

Technorati Tags: biofuel, campaign, ecology, firefox, midgard, biofuel, refuel