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If you ever started losing power in your smartphone and fumed that it was only a few years old, you were probably even angrier when you learned the device couldn’t be repaired. There are two reasons for that. One, the majority of cell phone manufacturers don’t want customers to repair their cells and keep them for a longer period of time but instead upgrade to the newest version. That’s when you may have learned in frustration that the b...

There are a lot of good reasons to recycle your used electronics. Lithium-ion batteries in e-Waste is one of them. Recycling helps protect our environment, lowers the cost of manufacturing new products, and enables the e-waste recycling industry to create jobs. Low recycling rates for e-waste are a worldwide problem. It requires a global solution. We need to improve our recycling rates for e-waste. But another reason to recycle e-waste i...

Waste management is becoming a bigger challenge across the globe. And that's particularly true of e-Waste. When the first International E-Waste Day was announced for Oct. 13, organizers invited the public to consider some sobering facts about how waste management and e-Waste are impacting our lives. Developed by the WEEE Forum, an international association of e-waste collection organizations in 20 nations, this new annual day was designed t...

The time appears to have arrived for green electronics recycling. Last April, Apple announced that its global facilities would be powered entirely by clean energy. That's a 100% commitment to fighting climate change and working toward a healthier environment. Their clean energy now fuels Apple offices, retail stores, and data centers in 43 countries. It's what Apple CEO Tim Cook called a commitment to “leaving the world better than we fou...

If someone asked you what can be done about e-Waste, what would you say? When the subject of e-waste comes up, it’s usually in an environmental context. The image most people have of e-waste is electronics device that are mass produced, like smart phones, and get updated so rapidly that the number of used phones being discarded keeps rising. Since only about a third of unwanted smartphones gets recycled today, that means most end up in a ...

In the United States, there are no federal environmental laws that deal with the disposal of e-waste or address the environmental impact of tossing used electronics out with regular household trash. The states have no federal rules to follow, no regulations to be complied with when it comes to electrical waste recycling. Basically, the issue has been left to the states to decide, and 25 states and the District of Columbia have responded by dra...

In this digital age we’re in, when there are more smartphones than people in the world, it’s been noted that technology has made all our lives better – except when it doesn’t. You might think that’s a reference to devices that malfunction from time to time. You know, we come to rely on our phones or laptops and go crazy when they stop working. But that’s not the concern here. Everything breaks down from time to time, and we either ...

Electronic hoarding of used electronics and old electronics can be a major issue and can not only clutter up your household but also harm the environment. Here's how to stop hoarding. There’s a term called digital hoarding, which is sometimes referred to as e-hoarding. Think of it as the electronic equivalent of someone who keeps a file cabinet filled to the brim with old papers -- documents and notes and files that no longer have any releva...

Given a list of places in the community that people would like to hang out at – theaters, shopping malls, local arenas – there’s one place that probably won’t turn up on anybody’s list, and that’s the community landfill. Unless you think you lost something precious and figure it’s worth your time driving over there to hunt for it, most of us assume our landfills are dirty, foul-smelling places that we’re eager to avoid. The ...

In the United States, no federal law exists mandating the takeback or recycling of e-waste, or used electronics that Americans no longer want. But that hasn’t stopped 25 states from passing legislation to regulate what happens to electronics once consumers have decided to get rid of them as they purchase newer models. Those states have recognized the problem that e-waste creates. Worldwide, there are more smartphones than there are people...