Get Paid To Celebrate National Cell Phone Recycling Week

Did you know that we're right in the middle of National Cell Phone Recycling Week? Did you further know that there's a way you can get paid to join the celebration? You didn't? Well, then there's no time to waste. Pay close attention.

National Cell Phone Recycling Week is an initiative of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, to raise awareness that cell phones are chock full of valuable materials that can be recycled and toxic substances that need to be kept out of the environment.

As a public service, the wireless carriers and a number of retailers are collecting your old decrepit cell phones so that they can be properly dismantled, separated by type of material, and recycled to make new cell phones and other things. Now if you have one or more of those old critters hiding in the bottom of a desk drawer or in a junk box in the garage, you know the right thing to do is your civic duty by dropping off that phone at a collection point. For very little effort on your part, you'll be preventing generations of environmental damage that occur when electronic products decompose in the environment.

What you probably don't know, but might suspect, is that many cell phones and other devices, such as GPS systems, digital cameras, MP3 players, satellite radios, laptop computers, camcorders and gaming consoles are still very much functional. Seems a shame to send them to the crusher just because you've traded up for a newer model. You'll really think that's inappropriate once you find out that you can get paid to send in your old electronics.

This is the little secret on how to get paid to celebrate the environment this month and every month. You don't have to worry about running ads or auctions or any of that. You simply look up what your cell phone or other electronic device is worth, request a free postage paid shipping box, and spend next to no time packing it up and sending it in. That's it. You'll get your check shortly thereafter.

Actually, selling your unwanted electronics for reuse is even more green than recycling the materials. By passing this device on to those who can still use it, you are avoiding the need to spend energy manufacturing yet another product to replace one that is being disposed. When that device is finally used up and no longer functional, then it's time to grind it up to make new ones.

I should mention that another good deed you can do is to donate your working product or the proceeds you get from your sale to a charitable organization. In these economic times, there's an almost overwhelming need for social support services of all kinds. You may find an organization nearby that you want to help. Otherwise, you can choose to take the cash or donate it to charity when you sell your cell phone or electronic device of value.

Why Alternative Energy Makes Sense for Technology Companies

Energy and information. They are inexorably linked in our virtualized business world. In fact, our ability to provide enough energy may be the undoing of the cyber world as surely as the byproducts of energy production may be the undoing of our modern physical world. Think global warming has nothing to do with Business 2.0? Think again.

We tend to think of energy limitations and dirty, smelly, messy, polluting energy sources as legacies of the industrial age. Now that we have entered the information age, the seamy side of business and consumer life should be abating. This should be especially true in the online world. It seems so pristine and post-industrial. Just click open your browser and you have instant transportation to anywhere in the world to communicate, observe and transact business. How can a world of belching smokestacks and filthy rivers be in any way related to this?

Our online world is a world of illusion. It's not just virtual spaces that are created as alternate universes. It's everything. We think in terms of PCs, wireless access points, fiber optic strands stretching around the world with occasional routers directing traffic, and Web servers somewhere out there. In the privacy of our offices, or while immersed in notebook computers on restaurant table tops, it all seems so highly efficient and low energy. Efficient? Perhaps in the organizational sense. Low energy? Not a chance.

In order for us to visit a museum in Paris or get stock quotes from New York using nothing but battery power, Gigawatts are being expended on our behalf. The WiFi hot spot we're connected to needs at least a few watts to transmit and receive. It is fed by a router that uses more electricity. All those routers, and there are many, between source and destination are each sucking fractional kilowatts from the grid. At the far end, a Web server or server farm processes our request and responds with the data files we're seeking. Ever catch a chill in a server room? Probably not unless you've had a power failure in January.

But that's just a part of the picture. There are more servers. Lots and lots of servers that help us find what we're looking for in the first place. Google is a multi-Megawatt power sink, with most of it being lost to heat rejection. All that heat needs an equally powerful cooling system to ensure that the waste BTUs are ejected from the building before they melt the processors.

Add to this the industrial world of manufacturing that actually makes all those computers, servers, displays and batteries, and you've got a huge energy requirement for technology that seems low energy when you only look at one piece of the system at a time. Where does all that energy come from? Belching smokestacks mostly. Perhaps not so visibly belching smoke these days. The EPA has done a good job in cleaning up the smelly and acidic atmospheric emissions. The Cuyahoga River hasn't caught fire in decades. In fact, most of our waterways look pretty clean at a glance. But we're still burning coal and most of our electronic waste is still being tossed in landfills for future generations to deal with.

The majority of us don't come home from work with grimy faces anymore, so we don't feel dirty. The pollution we're creating is more insidious. Carbon Dioxide is replacing smog as the instrument of our demise, if we choose to simply ignore it and continue as-is. A few decades from now we might just be asking why it's so hot outside the server room.

What we want from business today is speed. We want instant transactions, instant access to the World's library of everything ever written, and high definition video downloaded as fast as possible. That speed comes at the price of power. Power itself comes at a price, and it's going up. Nuclear power was first promoted as too cheap to meter. Now we're wondering if we can afford to build any more reactors and deal with their radioactive waste products. Fusion power was 50 years away fifty years ago. It still is. There's still coal, oil and natural gas, at least for awhile. Sequestering their carbon emissions may prove so expensive we'll quickly become energy limited or take our chances on a toasty future.

Another approach is to face the music and begin generating the increasing levels of power we need from non-polluting resources. This should be a national and worldwide agenda, but companies can go ahead and get control of their power supplies before the politicians stop bickering. The best prospects are wind, water and solar. The best of these for most companies is solar. That nice big flat roof on your building is perfect for a solar panel farm. By connecting it to the grid, you don't have to worry about local energy storage and your peak power production will be during the mid-day, which is normally the time of peak power consumption. Google has "seen the light" already and is installing solar panels at their facility in Mountain View, California.

Colocation facilities seem like a natural match for alternative energy sources of all types. They are electricity intensive, already have backup batteries and inverters to deal with momentary grid interruptions, and require diesel generators to pick up the load during catastrophic power failures. But site such a facility near a hydro dam, especially a private one, or with enough land to support windmills, plus the solar arrays, and a colo might become energy independent. Perhaps even to the point of not needing diesel backup at all.

Far from being independent of the limitations of industrial age power sources and their environmental effects, higher technology companies are exacerbating the problem. We'll have to start thinking in terms of contributing to the energy demands of the coming decades if we don't want to find ourselves stifled by limited power availability or damaging the world we want to live in.