Sell Your Old Cell Phones to Help the Environment
Carbon Rally and Gazelle have teamed up to form a new challenge called Ringtone Revival. The goal of this challenge is to reduce the amount of CO2 waste produced from recycling and disposing of cell phones. Individuals or teams can reduce 94lbs of CO2 for each cell phone that is sold, donated or given to a family member or friend. Now to go a little into what they companies are about and how you can get involved.
Carbon Rally
The main objective of Carbon Rally is to motivate individuals and groups to make small changes in personal behavior that can make an overall large impact on how much CO2 is reduced. They make it fun to fight back against climate change. The idea behind the site is to encourage people to make small steps that are more realistic and can have fun with. People can propose ideas to reduce carbon emissions and allow a community of people to get involved. The site will then track the progress your community has made to show your progress against other communities.
Gazelle
Gazelle provides a place for consumers to sell or recycle their unwanted electronics. What is nice about this company is that it allows you to search through a database of electronic devices and see based off of it’s condition what you would receive for that item. What is also nice is that they pay for you to ship them the item and ensure that all personal information is removed from them. It makes great sense to sell electronics that are just laying around your house or hidden away in the back of a drawer.
Why you should Sell/Donate?
The Ringtone Revival initiative is a great way for us to participate in making sure that more cell phones or electronic devices don’t end up in landfills. Currently, over 85% of old cell phones that are replaced are still in usable condition. Nothing is wrong with wanting the latest cell phone, but it seems like such a waste to just let that cell phone sit around or thrown away when it could be reused.
According to EPA estimates, if Americans had recycled all of the 100 million cell phones they stopped using in 2006, the energy saved would have been enough to power nearly 200,000 U.S. homes for one year.
What’s scary is that 1.5 and 1.9 tons of discarded electronics ended up in landfills in 2006. Why not just donate it or sell it if you are not going to be using it anymore. Gazelle makes it extremely easy for you by even paying for you shipping and handling charges. If it is too inconvenient to ship your old electronics , you could even take the cell phone to a donation box where they give them to wife’s who have been battered. There are even recycling facilities across America so at least they can be recycled. Anyway you choose to help, sign up for Ringtone Revival on Carbon Rally to show how much of an impact you have made.
Green Jobs In High Demand
Renewable energy has started to really pick over the past few decades. With the high growth in the research and development of these new alternative sources of energy, there will be a need for more scientist, researchers, machine works and various other jobs. It is predicted that 4.2 million new environmentally friendly “green” jobs will be created over the next 30 years, almost 10% of the job growth over that period.
Photo by richardmasoner.
That is a huge number of jobs that could be created if we continue in the right direction. There will probably be a loss of jobs if we continue to move towards renewable energy, jobs will start to decrease in traditional dirty energy sources like gas and coal and move towards new renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal and others. It is refreshing to see that such a large number of jobs will be created not only to manufacture and maintain the new equipment, but academic positions in science and engineering will be created to research ways to makes these new energy sources more efficient.
How the Green Jobs will be Created
There are several assumptions that need to happen in order to reach the 4.2 million green jobs that include:
- 40% of our electricity consumption will be coming from renewable energy sources; 1/2 of which will be coming from wind and solar energy.
- Buildings becoming more energy efficient to reduce their electricity use by 35%.
- A shift from traditional fuels to bio-fuels and ethanol.
I hope that our country is able to surpass the first 2 assumptions, but reaching those numbers would be a great achievement regardless. I am not in agreement with the last one as many of you may know because ethanol and other bio-fuels are not environmentally friendly and are only temporary solutions to the problem. Along with that, they only raise the prices of food for our country. The right direction for our country would be to move more to renewable energy sources and have more electric cars or begin to use hydrogen for vehicles.
Lets just hope that our country capitalizes on using clean energy sources to not only be a more eco-friendly country, but to boost our economy and raise our job growth.
Reusable Shopping Bags on the Rise
Plastic bags have really taken a toll on our environment and people are starting to recognize it. Reusable bags have started to become more popular with both business and consumers. It just makes economical and environmental sense to use more sturdy bags that can be reused.
Dangerous Plastic Bags
An estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed each year throughout the world and many of those bags end up right in landfills immediately after their usage. Many of these bags also end up in the ocean waters causing many animals to die from eating them mistakenly for food. On top of that, plastic bags are not biodegradable but break up into small pieces that contaminate our soils and waters.
Plastic Bags’ Hidden Cost
Besides having negative effects on the environment, plastic bags are also costing retailers an estimated $4 billion per year to have available to consumers. That is right, $4 billion. That is a tremendous cost that will eventually make it way down to us. It may not seem like it on the surface, but retailers are not the ones truly paying for this cost, we are. They simply pass this cost onto the consumers by raising the prices of their goods. Imagine if more companies began to stop producing plastic bags. The cost of running their business would be cheaper and many of them could begin to sell reusable bags to make even more money.
Ways We can Help
There are many ways to get away from using plastic bags and one of them is not to start using paper bags from stores. Paper bags are just as wasteful and tend not to be extremely sturdy. There are far better options. One option for cities is to ban plastic bags such as in Westport, Conn. Though this option forces us to get away from plastic bags, people should not be forced by the government. Another option is to just no use bags when you go to the store. This is excellent for when you only buy small items or items you can carry out of the store and does not cost consumers or businesses anything. The obvious flaw is if you buy multiple and/or heavy items from a store.
Reusable Bags to the Rescue
Reusable bags are becoming more and more popular lately as business are starting to stop carrying plastic bags and allowing consumers to either buy or use reusable bags.
Bags on the Run is a company that is trying to get companies away from using plastic bags and towards using reusable bags. Bags on the Run sought to find a way to produce an eco-friendly, high quality yet affordable bag. They were able to produce a bag made of Polypropylene that not only is strong, but can be recycled. The material can be made without having to be woven and in various thicknesses depending on its intended purpose. It also is not toxic like plastic and will cause no allergic reactions to the skin. It’s neat to see that even people in Hollywood are using these bags.
If you cannot find these bags at your local store or you do not have a need for large quantities of bags, there are other options as well. There is probably a bag lying around your house that you can always use or you can purchase a reusable bag from your local store or at an online retailer to find reusable bags.
The shift to move away from one-time use bags such as plastic and paper bags to reusable bags is just one more way we can become a more eco-friendly society.
Solar Energy Tax Credit Sneaks into Bailout Bill
The big story over the last few weeks has been the economy and how the billion dollar bailout package would help lift our struggling stock market. Whether you agree completely over this bailout package, one good thing that came out of it was an extension to the renewable energy tax credits that have been neglected by Congress over the past year. Many believe that this tax credit is key to continued growth of wind, solar and new alternative energy sources. It allows emerging technologies such as wind energy to become a more financial viable option.
As mentioned in a previous article, Arizona would have had the most to lose if this tax credit were not passed. The Solana Generating Station is a proposed solar power plant by a Spanish company called Abengoa Solar. The plant was projected to be built by 2011 and could provide a large portion of Arizona’s energy. The company said that the only way for the project to be economical for them would be for the tax credits. Arizona was worried earlier in the Summer that they could lose this project to another country where more support could be provided for alternative energy sources.
The bailout bill contains an 8 year extension on the 30% solar tax credits that are already in place. With an estimated 60,000 employees working in the solar energy industry, this extension will provide a huge boost. The bill also provides a 1 year extension on the tax credits for smaller sources of energy such as wind, geothermal, hydro-power and many others. The passing of this bill could make an enormous impact on the renewable energy industry and continue to move our country in the right direction.
