The Basel Action Network, an American watchdog group that has sought to curb the export of toxic electronic waste from the United States, plans to begin a new certification and auditing program on Thursday for both recyclers and companies that generate electronic refuse.
BAN launched a new program to certify that electronics are safely recycled launched today with the backing of environmental groups and several companies including Samsung.
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sand just because people in America want the latest and greatest. People in developing countries need computers
RecycleBank partners with cities and haulers to reward households for recycling. Households earn RecycleBank Points that can be used to shop at over 1,500 local and national businesses.
The National Broadband Plan is a bold roadmap for the future of the Internet in America
Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.
(CNN) -- The champions at the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver can stand on the podium proud of their achievements, but the eco-minded among them can be extra proud that their medals are made with traces of precious metals recovered from e-waste.
According to a new report, however, a more universal solution to a growing problem needs to be found.
E-waste comprises discarded electronic appliances, of which computers and mobile telephones are disproportionately abundant because of their short lifespan. The current global production of E-waste is estimated to be 20–25 million tonnes per year, with most E-waste being produced in Europe, the United States and Australasia. China, Eastern Europe and Latin America will become major E-waste producers in the next ten years. Miniaturisation and the development of more efficient cloud computing networks, where computing services are delivered over the internet from remote locations, may offset the increase in E-waste production from global economic growth and the development of pervasive new technologies.
Officials say Howard A. Schmidt, a longtime computer security executive who worked in the Bush administration and has extensive ties to the corporate world, has been chosen to take on the task of organizing and managing the nation's increasingly vulnerable digital networks.
Deciding between new or used computers? Here’s a rundown on the benefits of buying refurbished equipment:
Brian Williams makes the right call to save the environment. Recycle electronics
Nigeria, Studies carried out by the Ministry of Environment has revealed that half a million of used computers come into the country every month.
Are e-books an environmental choice?
E-books are simple, in principle. They replace the familiar, texturally pleasing dead-tree kind of book with a device that most closely resembles a laptop with no keyboard. For years, the glossy, low-resolution display on most e-books has been one of the most significant barriers to their adoption, but a new display technology called e-ink has that problem pretty much licked.
The e-ink display of Amazon's latest entrant in the field, the Kindle 2, has a lot in common with paper: It's high-contrast, high-resolution and can be viewed with reflected light—just like a real book. And while e-books sales are only three percent of the global book market, e-book reading software is proliferating across other devices, from the iPhone to "ultraportable" computers.
The accelerating popularity of e-books has traditional publishers scrambling to make sure the devices don't do to their business what the web did to newspapers: In fact, this month, Indigo Books & Music cited the explosion of e-book readers as the primary motivation for their move into e-book publishing, and Amazon's Kindle library now includes 240,000 books, not to mention newspapers and magazines.
Whether or not the iPod-ization of book reading is now inevitable, change always begs the same question around these parts: Are e-books green?
The greenest way to read
The short answer is almost certainly yes but only if you're comparing e-books to new books.
As usual, the greenest way to go is reuse—buying used books online won’t do your favourite author any favours, but Mother Earth will smile on you for the estimated 3 kg of carbon emissions you've averted by not buying a new book. (Seventy percent of those emissions are released in the course of simply producing the paper it’s printed on.)
Several studies have attempted to break down the carbon footprint of reading on screen versus paper, but they've mostly focused on newspapers. (