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Apple's Going Greener with New Hire

Danny Estrada — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:59:29 -0500

Apple just hired Oliver Sanche, eBay's former Senior Director of Data Centers Services and Stategies. Sanche also happens to be the leading expert on the greening of cloud computing facilities. Sanche was assisting eBay in its quest to become carbon neutral since 2007. His latest contribution to providing a world for your future Mac-using offspring, has been the overseeing of eBay's newest data-center, which will reach the second highest LEED standards when it goes live in 2010.

Now Apple is looking to clean up their footprint on our planet by using Sanche's services in overseeing their planned billion dollar, 500,000-square-foot facility in North Carolina that will serve as Apple's primary East Coast data center. Sanche has helped to combine and conserve eBay's energy uses by utilizing a combination of solar energy, facilities management, and the adoption of a high-quality carbon-offset program.

Apples new data-center will be nearly five times the size of its current center based in Newark California. If Sanche pulls off another Gold Leed Standard with Apple, he will definitely be able to provide some top-quality consultation for architects and developers in providing LEED Standard buildings.

Via CultOfMac

Apple's Green Claim Irks Dell

JC Domingo — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:55:44 -0500

Last Friday, the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus found the Apple advertisement of being the ‘greenest’ of green to be a “broad superiority claim” against other computer manufacturers and should change their taglines to “avoid overstatements,” according to Macworld. NAD said Apple has high EPEAT ratings for all its laptops; no other manufacturer has “comparable high ratings for all of the notebooks it produces.”

Dell VP of Communities & Conversation Bob Pearson said in a December blog, “Don’t skip [being part of the conversation of wanting to be green] and go right to ads that may not even be truthful... We have repeatedly said we want to be the greenest technology company on the planet. This is our aspiration. It really motivated us inside Dell to chase this goal… We wish Apple would be more bold in making a difference rather than making ads. If they do both, then fantastic, run all the ads you want. But don’t forget what this is all about. And, remember, we’re just getting started.”

In recent years, the ‘green’ movement has taken precedence over almost everything. You’ll see it all over advertisements for cars and computers. More recently, you might haveve seen it in Apple commercials, stating Apple has “the world’s greenest family of notebooks.” Apple posted on its website their environmental status report, stating:

“The new MacBook Pro embodies Apple’s continuing environmental progress. It is designed with the following features to reduce environmental impact:

-Arsenic-free display glass

-BFR-free

-Mercury-free LED-backlit display

-PVC-free internal cables

-Highly recyclable aluminum and glass enclosure

-Reduced packaging volume

-Meets ENERGY STAR Version 5.0 requirements

-Rated EPEAT Gold”

How to Make Your Mac Lifestyle Green

Mac|Life Staff — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:01:00 -0500

The best way to save power is not to use any. Ha! Fat chance. We are Mac users, we are iPhone junkies, we have daisy-chained power strips in every outlet and warts on every wall. Luckily there are ways to mitigate our thirst for the juice; some are free, others cost less than $20, and a few are hefty investments for the greenest of the tree frogs. But every little bit helps.

Saving Energy 101: The Energy Saver Panel
The first step on your journey to enlightenment and smaller utility bills is getting intimate with your Mac’s built-in power-management tools, found in System Preferences > Energy Saver. Here’s what to do when you get there, and some other tips for helping your Mac use less power.

Apple’s Energy Usage Calculator (www.apple.com/environment/resources/calculator.html) estimates a 75 percent savings when using the Energy Saver features on a Mac Pro or iMac, compared to keeping it running 24/7 with no energy-management enabled. The feature defaults to sleep mode after 10 minutes of inactivity, but try nudging the slider down to 5, and put the display to sleep even sooner than that. Give yourself a few days to get used to it—you can always slide it back up if it’s really that annoying to have to wake your Mac up after it’s been idling. But the savings can be significant.

An idle Mac equals more of your greenbacks  in the power company’s coffers.

If you have a laptop, don’t forget that you can use different settings when you’re using the battery and when the Mac is plugged in. Under the Settings For drop-down, make sure to visit all the preferences for both Battery and Power Adapter.

Laptops have two sets of settings.

Check this box, and your drive will spin down when it’s not needed. If your Mac is doing light duty (say, you’re shopping on eBay) and the hard drive isn’t being read or written to, it doesn’t need to be spinning--the Mac just uses its main memory, the RAM, instead.

Devices plugged into your USB or FireWire ports draw electricity too--not much, but enough that you should unplug them when you’re not using them.

Apple keyboards have screen brightness adjustments along the top row--use them! If your Mac notebook has backlit keys, you’ll save a little electricity by leaving them off when you can, especially if you rock an external keyboard.

When your laptop is charged to 100 percent, unplug it! Let it run down to 20 percent or so, then plug it back in. You’ll be conditioning your battery and using a little less electricity to boot.

Lights Out ($9.99, www.northernsoftworks .com) gives you more flexible power management than what’s offered in System Preferences. Use it to customize Energy Saver settings for specific apps, and even have the Mac shut down (instead of just going to sleep) after a specified period of idle time.

Lights Out offers more than the regular Energy Saver.

Remember that you don’t need to have Bluetooth or AirPort on if you’re not using them--they use electricity, and it’s a snap to turn either one off by clicking its icon in the menubar and selecting Turn Bluetooth (or AirPort) Off.

Don’t power it if you’re not using it--that goes for AirPort too.

Putting the display to sleep will save more energy than using a screensaver. Remember that you can add a layer of security--and keep your Mac from “waking all the way” just because you bumped the desk and jiggled the mouse a little--by requiring a password to return from sleep or the screensaver in System Preferences>Security.

If you don’t enter your password at the prompt, the Mac just goes back to sleep.

Click the Schedule button in the Energy Saver panel to set a startup/wake-up time and sleep/shutdown time so your Mac isn’t on all night long. If you do find yourself burning the midnight oil, just click Cancel when the shutdown dialog pops up at your prescheduled zero hour.

The scheduler could use a little more flexibility, like different settings for different days.

Advanced Greenery: Hacking Your Footprint

“Preferences?” you say. “Please.” Well, that was just the beginning. Once your Mac is on a power diet, you can start considering everything else you’ve got plugged in, and take a more holistic approach to powering down your power usage. Here’s how:

Thousands of sites can give you greening advice, but we dig WattzOn.com. You answer some questions about your life and your stuff (from cars and TVs down to your books and iPod case), and it estimates your total consumption and offers tips to reduce it. A free account lets you save that data, see it in new ways (for instance, it would take a solar panel of more 2,200 square feet to support a typical Mac|Life editor’s personal energy usage of 6,190 Watts), compare it to others’, and more.

Informative, easy-to-use WattzOn is quite illuminating.

Fancy systems can monitor the power usage of your entire house in real time, although they often require professional installation by an electrician. The Energy Detective, or TED ($144.95, www.theenergydetective .com), displays your current usage on an LCD, so you can see the effects of plugging in or unplugging devices right away. And it can estimate your monthly power bill, so you’re not shocked. The Centameter ($179.99 Canadian, about $144 at press time, www.eco-response.ca) displays your electricity usage and its cost, plus the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, and you can take the wireless display from room to room.

TED’s real-time energy monitoring lets you experiment with plugging and unplugging electronics for the most savings.

Power strips with timers (popular with people who own fish tanks) are pretty inexpensive--the GE 57698 24-Hour Power Strip Timer is just $19.99 on Amazon. One side has 4 plugs that are always on (for example, we always want power for our TiVo and the router it’s connected to). The other side has 4 plugs on a timer, so we don’t need to remember to turn off the power strip before work each morning, but our TV and stereo won’t suck up standby power all day.

Sleep Deeper

The default sleep function in Mac OS X is known as “hardware suspend mode,” meaning the RAM is still powered on to save the details of your session and allow you to wake the computer quickly.

Apple included Safe Sleep mode in Mac OS 10.4.3 (the feature works on PowerBook G4 and Intel laptops), which still keeps the RAM powered on to remember your session, but also writes the session details to a file on your hard drive. That way, if your laptop’s battery runs out while it’s asleep--which would kill power to the RAM, naturally--the contents of that saved file are transferred back to the RAM when you reconnect the Mac to an outlet and wake it up. It just takes a bit longer to wake up the Mac and restore your session.

Windows machines have a hibernation function too, known as “software suspend mode.” This saves the details of your session to the hard drive, so the computer can shut down totally and consume no power. If your Mac supports Safe Sleep mode (again, any Intel machine and the PowerBook G4, running Mac OS 10.4.3 or later), you can force the Mac to hibernate with the Deep Sleep widget (free, deepsleep.free.fr). It basically puts your Mac into software suspend mode right away, regardless of your remaining battery life, and your Mac won’t use any power at all while it’s hibernating.

The Greenest Mac:

A Reused One

Host your own website. OS X has its own built-in Web server. Instead of paying someone to host your Rick Astley Appreciation Society webpage, plug in your old Mac, enable Web Sharing in the Sharing pref pane, and you’re good to go. Add in some DNS hosting, and you can use your own domain name to point to websites hosted on your Mac.

Ditch CDs for good. Thanks to library sharing built into iTunes, you can easily turn an old Mac into the world’s greatest jukebox. A stereo mini-to-RCA cable is all you’ll need to output sound to your existing home stereo, and you’ll be able to control playback locally on another Mac or remotely with the Remote app for iPhone or iPod touch (free in the App Store). Extra points for setting the old Mac to automatically rip CDs as you insert them, making your new music server fully automated.

An Apple TV that also plays discs. The folks at Apple may not be fans of the optical disc anymore (and ultimately the earth will thank them), but plenty of people still prefer DVDs to digital downloads. An older Mac running Front Row and/or the VLC Media Player (free, www .videolan.org/vlc) brings you all the features of the Apple TV, with none of the limitations of that box. Play DVDs, drag and drop video and music files across your network, and play tons of formats--not to mention Hulu--that Apple doesn’t support on the Apple TV.

Roll your own file server. Family snapshots, your extensive collection of ’90s grunge albums, tax documents, and every paper you ever wrote in college. You may not need all of that on your Mac all the time, but it’s nice to have it available somewhere. Stash an old Mac and a bunch of unused external drives in your basement, and you’ve basically got a set-it-and-forget-it file server, courtesy of OS X’s File Sharing features.

Share the love. There’s nothing like a free computer to make someone’s day. And we all know at least one person who needs a tech makeover. And since Macs tend to age particularly well—especially for the routine browsing and emailing that most people do—kicking down an older Mac to your sibling or parents is a great way to turn Windows users into Mac-heads.

Dedicated BitTorrent client. BitTorrent is rad. And despite what the RIAA would have you believe, there’s plenty of great free, legal content available via torrents. But it can be a pain to leave your main Mac up and running for the days on end it takes to download giant torrents like the South By Southwest 2009 music sampler. All you need is a BitTorrent client like Transmission (free, www.transmissionbt .com) or Vuze (free, www.vuze.com) to turn an old Mac into a full-time BitTorrent box. And with some clients, you can easily control your torrents remotely over the Web. Just remember to use our energy-saving tips from earlier in the article to set your System Preferences to use less wattage from the wall.

Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

Mac|Life Staff — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:26:00 -0500

Your ecological footprint is the measure of your consumption of natural resources in comparison with the earth’s ability to regenerate them. Someone who eats very little meat, takes public transportation, drives a fuel-efficient car fewer than 25 miles a month, and recycles responsibly uses approximately 14.2 global acres of Earth’s productive area to sustain this type of lifestyle. We would need two or three planets to provide our present population with equivalent resources--and this is the carbon footprint for a very eco-conscious consumer!

Test your own carbon footprint by taking the quiz at www .ecofoot.org or try the iPhone app greenMeter ($5.99, iTunes App Store), which can measure your car’s fuel efficiency. We can reach our carbon-neutrality goals--one step at a time.

Earth Day Green Guide: A Natural Fit

Mac|Life Staff — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:06:00 -0500

For many of us, eco-consciousness has become simply, “consciousness,” and with good reason. Average consumers are now more aware than ever that their existence exacts a toll on the planet’s finite natural resources, which mustn’t be squandered.

The truth is, though, being Mac tech geeks, we aren’t necessarily part of the solution, unless we make an effort to shrink our impact. To be sure, Apple is trying to do its part--most recently in the form of the much-ballyhooed line of eco-friendly MacBooks, for example, with their recyclable aluminum unibody frames and glass screens, LED backlighting, longer-lasting batteries, and reduced quotient of toxins. But there are a lot of other ways you can help turn the tide of global warming and resource depletion, and that’s where the idea for this article took root.

In the following, we present a veritable garden of green, Apple-friendly products, hand-picked tips for reducing your Mac’s reliance on grid-supplied power, and--best of all--inspired ideas for reusing older Macs rather than just tossing them aside. Because we’re all in this together. And it’s our job to make sure you can do your part in the green movement without having to give up your dedication to your Apple technologies of choice.

How Green Are Your Gadgets?

Macs and iPods work best when accessorized properly. Lucky for you, third-party accessory makers are seeing green these days.

By now we all know the three tenets of eco-consciousness: reduce, reuse, and recycle. This holy trinity is also the basis upon which to green up your tech life. And for those of you who confuse the three R’s of ecogeekdom with the three R’s of elementary school, we have distilled these principles into a single letter for you: S. “S” is for “save,” which may be easier to remember and sounds like a lot less work. Save resources, save power, save money…save the earth.
And because we lay our green hopes at the doors of the scientists and engineers, we’ve complied a list of our favorite green gadgets and accessories that not only serve a function, but embrace an ethos.

>>Alt-Energy Power Sources

The most immediate positive impact we can have on the environment is to use our limited resources wisely. The tech industry is spitting out eco-friendly gadgets like mad to keep you working, while helping you stay off the grid.

Apple Juicz’s 55W solar charger keeps your ‘Book ready a roll.

The sun is the only power source you need for the QuickerTek Apple Juicz ($1,100 for the 55-watt model, www.quickertek.com), a lightweight solar panel designed to charge your MacBook in 5 hours. You can also power up your MacBook with Voltaic Systems’ messenger-style Generator bag ($499, www .voltaicsystems.com), whose 15-watt model needs 5 hours to charge the bag’s battery, from which you can juice up your ’Book.

Slip the power of the sun in your pocket with this compact solar-powered gadget charger.

For handheld gadgets there are more affordable options: Voltaic makes a Backpack Solar Charger ($249) that offers 4 watts of power and 11 adapters for charging a huge variety of handheld devices. The Powertraveller powermonkey-eXplorer ($129, powertraveller.com) is a solar-powered charger that’s small enough to fit in your pocket, but strong enough to give you the juice necessary to play 40 hours of music on your iPod. The Solio Magnesium Edition ($169.95, www.solio.com) soaks up sun with its delicate “leaves,” but is strong enough to charge virtually all of your handhelds. The MiniWiz HYmini ($49.99; www.hymini.com), billed as a “mini green power station that fits in the palm of your hand,” leverages the power of wind or the sun to charge most 5V gadgets. The Medis 24-7 Power Pack ($40, www .medistechnologies.com), utilizes fuel-cell technology, keeping you off the grid and in no need of an AC outlet. Once activated, the Power Pack lasts up to three months, and can give your devices six to eight charges, depending on how much power it requires per charge. Once the Power Pack is out of juice, you’ll need to send it back for a refill, which Medis makes easier by supplying you with the necessary return packaging. The Freeplay Energy FreeCharge ($32, www .freeplayenergy.com), a portable charger that has no internal batteries, creates power with a hand crank. Because the FreeCharge harnesses human energy and doesn’t need the sun or wind, it would make a great addition to an emergency kit. Just make sure to pack some energy bars so you’ll have enough stamina to wind the crank long enough to recharge your gear.

>> Reuse, Reclaim, and Refurbish

The principles of refurbishing and reuse spring from the same well as those of recycling. Taking things that already exist and giving them a new life keeps them out of landfills, saves resources, and gives creatives a new purpose. It’s a win-win.

Freitag bags are made from used tarps, seat belts, and bicycle inner tubes--and they’re stylin’ to boot.

Made of rubber rescued from the tires of South American trucks, Tread cases (starting at $24.95 for an iPod nano, www.tread.com) are water-, heat-, acid-, and UV-resistant, and, as such, will surely protect your precious digital cargo. Also available from Tread are MacBook bags made out of the old tires, such as the Coco 15-inch Mac Bag ($199.95). Freitag makes computer bags (among other things) out of the old tarps once used to cover trucks, coupled with used seat belts, air bags, and bicycle inner tubes. The bags, such as the Top Cat ($253.75, www.freitag.ch), were conceived  by Swiss messengers, whose aim was to make durable, waterproof, sustainable products. And Rickshaw Bagworks’s Zero Messenger bag ($40 to $60, www .rickshawbags.com), made from domestically sourced, recyclable nylon, and designed to minimize manufacturing waste, prove that eco-friendly design can go beyond hemp necklaces and those Guatemalan pants we loved so much in college.

Green innovation doesn’t stop with bags, however. Contexture Design reclaims old cassettes and fashions its 45 nano Cases ($45, 45ipodcases.com) for 4th-gen nanos. And Swedish company INF Import utilizes old newspaper and wood chips to make 512MB and 16GB Recycled USB Drives (www .infimport.com).

>> REDUCE

Aside from alternative power, reducing your use of energy and raw materials when purchasing Mac and iPod accessories can greatly impact your environmental footprint.

When you’re pumping up your Mac’s storage capacity, consider using components with built-in power-saving and other eco-friendly features. Western Digital’s Caviar Green internal SATA hard drives ($99.99/500 GB-$139.99/1TB, westerndigital.com) consume less power than other internal SATA drives, helping you save money and energy at the same time.

Reclaim your vinyl: turn your records into digital grooves with the Newmark TTi.

For music freaks, the iPod and iTunes Store combo is an incredibly green way to pump up your music collection. Even without the cardboard “long boxes” common in the early 1990s, physical CDs are still tremendously wasteful. By downloading your tracks instead of purchasing hunks of plastic and paper, you’re saving a lot of raw materials, not to mention the fuel associated with moving discs around the planet. And now that iTunes has gone DRM-free--and with a higher bit-rate to boot--it’s rekindled our love of the iTunes Store. For anyone with huge collections of records or cassette tapes, there are plenty of options for digitizing that old-school media, so it’s playable on your iPod. Numark’s TTi turntable ($449; www .numark.com) turns your old Tower of Power LPs into the ones and zeroes your iPod can play. And if tapes are more your thing, the Alesis TapeLink USB ($299, www.alesis.com) can bring all your old Skid Row and Prince cassingles into the digital age.

Green Is the New Black

Going green may seem like the latest fashion trend, but the truth is there’s a mountain of gear that gets outdated every couple of months and a ton more that gets created with each Apple keynote address. With each new “One More Thing,” there are millions of Tired Old Things that invariably get tossed aside--Americans throw out a couple million tons of e-waste each year. And, as we all know, our tech gear is laden with toxins and cannot just be dumped in landfills. Here’s the lowdown on e-cycling:

TVs. By now we all know that the deadline for switching our televisions from analog to digital is June 12, 2009. By that time, an estimated 24 million cathode ray tube televisions (CRT) will need to be disposed of. So, what should we do with the mountain of old analog TVs? First of all, if you buy a converter box or subscribe to cable or satellite, you can hang on to your existing TV. If not, remember that CRT TVs contain toxins like chromium, lead, and mercury, so it’s important to recycle them, not dump them. For recycling centers near you, check out:

>> Earth 911 (earth911.com/electronics/)
>> My Green Electronics (www .mygreenelectronics.org/)
>> Sony’s recycling program (tinyurl .com/35meqg)
>> National Recycling Coalition (tinyurl .com/dleoga)

Cell Phones. There are currently around 500 million unused cell phones in the United States, and of the 130 million mobiles that will be retired this year alone, fewer than 10 percent will be recycled. What you can do: Think before you buy a new cell phone (do you really need a new one?), and if you do, recycle or donate your old one. Check out these sites for tips on how and where to do that:

>> www.epa.gov/cellphone
>> www.recyclewirelessphones.com
>> www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com
>> www.charitablerecycling.com
>> www.eco-cell.org

In-Store Recycling. Many stores that sell technology will help you recycle that tech when it’s outlived its usefulness:

>> Office Depot (tinyurl.com/cejmk5)
>> Staples ($10 fee for recycling large equipment, tinyurl.com/cz9sm3)
>> Apple (purchase any qualifying Apple computer or display and receive free recycling of your old computer and monitor--regardless of manufacturer, www.apple.com/environment/recycling)

Don’t Hate It, Donate It. Sure, you’re over it, but your old digital trash could be a schoolkid’s treasure. For info on donating, see:

>> www.pcsforschools.org
>> www.justgive.org
>> Tech Soup’s Donate Hardware page (tinyurl.com/2ajpb)

Cash In. These sites offer money for old cell phones (and some accept iPods and PSPs too):

>> www.cellforcash.com
>> www.phoneiscash.com
>> www.cashmyphone.com
>> www.simplysellular.com
>> www.buymytronics.com

Saving Paper: It Doesn’t Grow on Trees, You Know

Mac|Life Staff — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:32:00 -0500

Well, not literally at least. And paper costs money, duh, and that isn’t littering the ground these days either. Here’s how to tread more lightly on the forest (besides just buying recycled paper) while saving some sawbucks too.

>> Double up. It's easy to print more than one page on each sheet of paper, and works especially well for things that are typed large anyway, like Keynote or PowerPoint presentations with their big old bullet points. In the Print dialog, select Layout from the drop-down menu, and change the Pages Per Sheet from 1 to 2 (for text documents), or even 4 (bulleted presentations).

Not for the squinty.

>> Get duplex. If you're in the market for a new printer, look for one that can do two-sided printing. Otherwise, you can print on both sides of the page by printing the odd-numbered pages of your document first, then flipping those over and printing the even-numbered pages on the back.

>> Trim the fluff. Make sure your document won't print with a blank or nearly blank page at the end. When printing from webpages, click the Preview button in the Print dialog and check out your document—maybe the last sheet is just legalese and footers you don't need, or maybe everything you want is on page 2 and you don't need pages 1 or 3 at all. In text documents, take a second to delete blank lines from the bottom before printing to avoid a phantom blank page at the end. (Of course, those blank sheets can go right back in the printer. We've actually witnessed people merely recycle them, which is better than trashing ’em or giving paper cuts to baby seals, but still...)

>> Just the good parts. Microsoft Word lets you easily print just parts of the document by selecting the text and then in the Print dialog's Copies & Pages section, clicking the radio button for Selection. Only the text you've selected will print (remember you can select non-adjacent text by holding down the Command button).

Pick and choose exactly which passages you want printed. We wish this worked in Pages.

>> Use up paper! Start tossing envelopes and paper that's only marked on one side in a scrap-paper bin, so you'll have a ready supply when you need to jot down a quick note. We know one person who prints one-page meeting handouts for her job (agendas, calendars, things like that) on the blank sides of already-used paper salvaged from the recycling bin, and you know what? No one's ever complained.

>> Don’t print. Of course, the best way to save paper is not to print at all. Note-taking apps like Evernote (free, www.evernote.com) and Yojimbo ($39, www.barebones.com) give you a place to save information from the Web, PDFs, text files, and images so you DON'T have to print them and file them for later. Plus, everything is searchable so you don't have to worry about misfiled papers disappearing into your filing cabinet to never be heard from again. And we've given this tip before, but it never hurts to repeat: Every Mac app that prints can print to PDF, no additonal software needed. Just click the PDF button in the Print dialog and choose Save As PDF. (For tips on organizing your PDF library with iTunes or Yep, visit www.maclife.com/article/manage_pdfs)

Cross-platform, super-awesome Evernote lets you sync info between its Mac, Windows and iPhone apps, and log in from any browser.

DTV Changeover Recycling Tips

Jan Hughes — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:28:00 -0600

By now we all know that the government has mandated that analog television programming become digital. While the original date that was set for February 17, 2009, has been moved to June 12, 2009, about a third of the nation’s TV stations have already made the switch. But there’s still a little time to decide whether or not you want to buy a new HD TV, order a converter box, or subscribe to cable or satellite television.

For those of you hanging on to your existing TV, we salute you. For those of you who need to know what to do with the old analog buddy that saw you through many a late-night movie, we have some tips.
There are an estimated 24 million cathode ray tube televisions (CRT) that will need to be disposed of, and because they contain toxins such as chromium, lead (4 to 8 pounds per TV!), and mercury, it’s imperative that we recycle them. There really otta be a law, but until there is a national regulated recycling system in place, here are some end-of-life solutions for your old TV:

For TV recycling centers near you, check out:

eRecycle: for all things related to e-cycling your old TVs
Earth 911: find recycling centers near you, and get the skinny on how to make Earth Day every day
My Green Electronics: to find recycling centers closest to your zip code
National Recycling Coalition: for state by state recycling resources
Electronics Industry Alliance: to find reuse, recycling, and donation programs in your state
International Association of Electronic Recyclers Directory of the Electronics Recycling Industry: provides a comprehensive database on the electronics recycling industry
Directory of the North American Scrap Electronics Recycling Industry: for a list electronics scrap processors and buyers across North America
eStewards: because not all e-cycling centers are ethically managing toxic waste (really, how low can one go?), eStewards has created a gold star system for recyclers that have signed the Electronic Recycler's Pledge of True Stewardship, what eStewards consider to be “the most rigorous criteria for sustainable and socially just electronics recycling.

To donate obsolete but still working TVs, consider:

Goodwill Industries (please note: not all thrift stores want old TVs or computers because they are too expensive to dispose of if they are not working, so check first)
Salvation Army
Local schools, community organizations (maybe donate a digital-to-analog converter box along with it!)
Recycle for Breast Cancer
Freecycle: This site that will help you find an organization near you that wants your contraband.

Utilize TV manufacturer’s recycling options:

Sony and Waste Management
Samsung Recycling Direct: Samsung recently partnered with Wal-Mart to take back Wal-Mart’s house branded TVs

This list should really be longer . . . come on, manufacturers!

Sunburned: Solar's Dirty Little Secrets

Jan Hughes — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 04:59:00 -0600

Green gadgets make our collective heart go pitter-patter. We feel good when we can be part of the solution. Solar-powered gadgets have become de rigueur in our attempts at shrinking our carbon footprint. And utilizing the power of the sun is the one bright shining beacon of the alternative-energy movement. But there is a dark side to solar energy.

Materials used in solar panels are toxic.
Because solar is the hip, happening alt-energy trend du jour, the number of photovoltaic cells produced globally has increased dramatically in the past few years. But unfortunately, many of the solar panels manufactured today are made with cadmium, a highly toxic carcinogen that can cumulate in plant, animal, and human tissues. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition has recently published a 45-page report, "Toward a Just and Sustainable Solar Energy Industry," claiming that many of the environmental risks associated with the production and disposal of solar panels are not currently being addressed by the industry. And because solar panels have a shelf life of 20 to 30 years, the Coalition claims that the panels have the potential of creating the next wave of hazardous e-waste when they "die." What to do? Clearly, as the solar industry grows, environmentalists and consumers must demand that manufacturers develop systems to ensure that solar panels are recycled and their hazardous toxins kept out of our ecosystem.

China is dumping hazardous waste from solar factories in fields.
According to the Washington Post, in the race to cash in on the world’s demand for solar products, China been leading the charge in producing polysilicon, a key component in sunlight-capturing wafers. Unfortunately, China is not enforcing environmental regulations, and many of the new factories are dumping toxic silicon tetrachloride (a byproduct of polysilicon production) directly into nearby farmlands. (Just for perspective, 4 tons of this toxic byproduct is produced for every ton of polysilicon.) Because it is expensive and time-consuming to set up systems to recycle the hazardous materials, companies are instead dumping indiscriminately, and people close to these sites are complaining of illness, crop failures, acrid air, and dead fields. How to proceed? Alt-energy companies around the globe need to make sure the factories from which they acquire their solar components are practicing environmentally responsible manufacturing.

We use fossil fuels to make green energy.
Yes, solar power produces clean energy, but it requires utilizing our current resources to produce it. For the green movement to be truly sustainable, we need to make sure we are not trading one environmental problem for another. Yes, the world needs renewable energy as our fossil fuels dwindle, but we need to make sure we are not polluting and depleting to acquire and perfect the new technology.

The good news.
Greensters can take heart, though. There is a still bright side to solar. According to recent studies cited in the Scientific American, while it takes resources and energy to make solar panels, we could still reduce our greenhouse gasses by 90 percent if photovoltaic power replaced fossil-fuel-based power. And in the meantime, there are organizations popping up to prevent and monitor rampant e-waste in the solar industry. PV Cycle, for example, is a European company dedicated to collecting and recycling end-of-life modules in solar panels. Smarty-pants tech institutes are exploring the use of carbon electrodes, as opposed to using the earth's rapidly depleting indium tin oxide, to make LCDs and solar panels. And watchdog organizations such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (mentioned earlier), which is dedicated to "creating social, economic, and environmental justice and promoting sustainable technology," are keeping a much-needed eye on the industry. Finally, is there gold in them thar hills? Perhaps reclaiming the precious materials used in solar panels will provide the incentive needed for more recycling/refurbishing companies to crop up and help keep the waste out of our landfills.