Video: While the press flocked to Samsung’s sexy ultrabooks and dazzling displays (it has its own 55-inch OLED, *drool*) during CES, something no less important went under-reported. It turns out the company has something to say about its products before and after they leave the factory. In the YouTube video below, the company offers a glimpse [...]
Read more CES 2012: Samsung’s secret to climbing the sustainability rankings
Sure, you can go to Gazelle.com and get cash for your old electronics, but some folks want instant gratification. For instance, the kind of people that use their local Redbox instead of queuing up a DVD on Netflix. Enter ecoATM, a startup that makes the automated “eCycling” system of the same name. Since it’s in [...]
Read more Video: ecoATM in action
How much e-waste does the U.S. government generate? According to General Services Administration (GSA) head Martha Johnson, “By some estimates, the federal government goes through 10,000 computers a week.” And that’s not the only staggering statistic in this Washington Post/Bloomberg article that examines the steps the GSA and EPA are taking to combat e-waste and [...]
Read more Stat of the day: Feds dispose 10K computers… a week
Game maker with a message, Molleindustria (NSFW), may have stumbled on a sure-fire way to shine a light on the dark side of the electronics industry: create an iOS app about it and get it banned by Apple. Long story short, the company created a game called Phone Story based on the unsavory practices surrounding the [...]
Read more Banned! Apple nixes conflict mineral-y, e-waste-y Phone Story app
Earlier today, I featured this story at CIO.com in the Top 10 about the Responsible Electronic Recycling Act, which places explicit restrictions on e-waste, closing loopholes that allows recyclers to pick off the choice parts from discarded electronics and ship off the rest. The hope is to stop the deplorable environmental and health conditions at [...]
Read more E-waste bills hit Capitol Hill
The electronics industry’s dirty little secret is about to get more international attention thanks to a U.N. program to monitor where our discarded gadgets end up. The New York Daily News is reporting that a United Nations program called StEP (Solving the E-Waste Problem) will monitor ports in Asia and West Africa to help pinpoint [...]
Read more U.N. to StEP up e-waste monitoring
Buck Consultants, a subsidiary of Xerox, has released some data on the state of green programs among U.S. businesses. In its third annual “Greening of the American Workplace” survey for 2010, the firm reports that 69 percent of American businesses have instituted energy-saving and waste- and carbon-reducing programs, up from 53 percent in the prior [...]
Read more 69 percent of American businesses had green programs in 2010
That’s what iFixit’s CEO, Kyle Wiens, thinks about Apple’s latest attempt to thwart hardware hackers. And it’s hard to disagree with him. While Apple has made enormous strides in greening its gadget slate, it still falls short on one critical aspect of reducing e-waste: designing repairable electronics. In addition to its penchant for non-user replaceable [...]
Read more Apple’s pentalobe screws for the iPhone take “planned obsolescence to the next level”
Video: Conceptually, e-waste is a simple concept. Businesses and consumers buy up gadgets that nowadays cost more to repair than re-acquire or upgrade. This causes mountains of toxic-laden trash to pile up in landfills or “recycling” centers overseas. Obviously, not a good thing. The issue becomes more complex when when you take into account how [...]
Since 2008, Dell has been able to reduce product packaging by 18.2 million pounds. For comparison’s sake, that’s the equivalent of “226 fully-loaded 18-wheelers or almost 4,184 small pick-ups,” according to a company statement. The statistic comes from the company’s latest corporate sustainability report. Dell attributes its success to a “three C’s” strategy, which stands [...]
Read more Dell cuts 18.2M pounds of packaging
This work by Pedro Hernandez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
