Monthly Archives: April 2008

Pre-owned games make developers green.

Posted by on April 11, 2008 Comments Off

games developers angry at pre-owned industryWe’re not talking environmental here, but we should be. Pre-owned games are much more environmental than buying new.

Less are manufactured as a result and fewer are shipped across seas in tankers to get to us.

Of course the developers would argue that the loss of profit means that less development can go into their creation and the public sufferers.

I’d like to hear the car industry arguing that one if they ever tried to ban the purchase of second hand cars.

Now, with the growth of online gaming, it may be possible for the developers to have the best of both worlds – to be more profitable and green – to the detriment of pocket money all over America.

In the meantime continue to enjoy pre-owned games and buy sell and trade pre-owned and used consumer electronics like cellphones, PC hardware, and digital cameras when you can, knowing that you’re being good to our wallet and your planet (nicked that one from upstairs).

What is a pity is that the pre-owned electronics industry is not as mature as the pre-owned games, music or movie industry. With camera and cellphone upgrades now coming out as fast as new games and movies, its time is surely coming.

Painting their store fronts green. The story so far…

Posted by on April 9, 2008 Comments Off

Office DepotThese days its imperative to exhibit your inherent greenness, whether your a corporate titan like Chevron who allegedly hire militia to decimate local villages on the side, or a local grocer like Trader Joe’s who this week introduced shopping bags made from biodegradable EnviRo 6400.

Today also saw the launch of a new line of recyclable office supplies from Office Depot called “Office Depot Green“.

The line includes core supplies such as recycled paper, notebooks and file folders, as well as re-manufactured ink and toner cartridges, non-toxic cleaners and compact fluorescent light bulbs.

This comes on the back of their Tech Recycling Program launched last October. This involved selling boxes (with pre-paid postage) for $5, $10 and $15 (Apple does it for free) which customers fill with old electronics, though ironically, much of it may well get shipped out to China for a tidy profit.

Where your recycled e-waste ends upBusiness takes the green dollar very seriously. Last year Best Buy initiated a program that sponsored drop-off events around the country, Wal-Mart held a pilot take-back day at 350 of its stores and HP announced it had reached one billion pounds of recycling sooner than expected.

Amazon also launched the now highly successful Green E-Commerce Page.

Whether buying green products or disposing of them responsibly, most American assume they’re helping the earth when they hand in their old computers, televisions and cellphones to these programs (often for a significant fee), but chances are they’re just adding to the lucrative trade in e-waste which endangers workers and pollutes the environment overseas.

It’s being recycled, but it’s being recycled in the most horrific way you can imagine” said Jim Pruckett of the Basel Action Network (BAN), a Seattle-based environmental group

“we’re preserving our own environment, but contaminating the rest of the world.”

One way that we can  help to reduce ewaste is by considering to buy and sell pre-owned or used consumer electronics like computers, gaming, PC hardware, cellphones and iPods. Trading in these productsreduces the demand for buying them new.

With the green bandwagon pacing ahead, it’s up to Americans to scrutinize and differentiate between those companies who make no impact but plenty of noise, and those who are genuinely concerned with effecting change over profit.

The computer helping to cut commuter emissions

Posted by on April 9, 2008 Comments Off

Heavy traffic is the USAA national study commissioned by the Consumer Electronics Association shows that using electronics to telecommute saves the equivalent of 9 to 14 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year — the same amount of energy used by roughly 1 million U.S. households every year.

The study, “The Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Impact of Telecommuting and e-Commerce,” was commissioned by CEA to determine energy savings and CO2 reductions that result from the nation’s increased use of electronics, such as personal computers and wireless networks.

“This report demonstrates that consumer electronics are part of a climate change solution, as the use of electronics is preventing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing fossil fuel consumption,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CEA.

The CEA study, conducted by TIAX LLC of Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that just one day of telecommuting saves the equivalent of up to 12 hours of an average household’s electricity use.

Telecommuting also saves 1.4 gallons of gasoline and reduces CO2 emissions by 17 to 23 kilograms per day, showing the power of one individual to impact their environment in a single day by using electronics, said Shapiro.

If that same worker, with a one-way commute of 22 miles, telecommuted five days a week, she would save about 320 gallons of gasoline and reduce CO2 emissions by 4.5 to 6 tons per year, according to TIAX researchers.

He or she would also save an amount of energy equivalent to roughly 4,000 to 6,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which is comparable to the electricity consumed by an average household in 4 to 6 months.

US Carbon Footprint Map on Al Gore’s Radar

Posted by on April 9, 2008 2 comments

vulacnhighres.jpgUnited States official carbon footprint data video has been published in full color, showing hot spot areas of concern. It shows the detailed emissions of all 9 million square kilometers and plots down to 100 square meter areas.

The Vulcan project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to quantify our fossil fuel CO2 emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past.

The detail and scope of the Vucan CO2 inventory makes it a valuable tool for policymakers, demographers and socail scientists.

Al GoreThis comes on the foot of Al Gore’s presentation evidencing the pace of climate change may be worse than what scientists have been recently predicting.

Evidence coming from the Vulcan project will back this call to challenge Americans to act with a sense of common urgency and ‘general mission… the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement.

He also called on the 3 presidential candidates to back up what they have been advocating on the campaign trail.

“(all) nominees have a very different and forward leaning position on the climate crisis… they’re saying the right things and should do the right thing when elected.”

He went on to say that every citizen should become an active participant in cimate change via personal action to activate legislative change on what he termed “the sclerosis in our civilization”.

For further reading go to Ted’s profile on Al Gore

Mountain of waste and suffering in Guiyu, China

Posted by on April 8, 2008 Comments Off

guiyu-largest-e-waste-site-on-earth-4.jpgIt’s no surprise to most that at the end of the product lifecycle, PC heaven is actually more like a PC hell.

Guiya is the largest e-waste site on earth according to wikipedia, where much of the e-waste from the rest of the world has been sent since the 1980s.

There, 5,500 e-waste businesses preside over a staggering 30,000 peasant workers. According to a local government website, these businesses process 1.5 million tons, creating $75 million each year, its single source of revenue.

The reason is that it’s 10 times cheaper to export this waste into China (data from US Environmental Protection Agency) than to safely recycle it here – the labor intensity of the task and safety rules drastically increase costs.

In Guiya there are no such safety rules, and as for labor, well… life is cheap to say the least.
ewaste1.jpg

Green recycling firms may not be so green

What many folks don’t realize is that recycling companies who charge to recycle our electronics may in fact be sending it to China too.

I’m not going to specifically red flag any of them, but I have been to quite a few of their websites and there’s plenty of velvety terms like ‘safely dispose of your monitor’ – but nothing to be found concerning how and where it is actually done.

I think that if it was done locally they’d be singing about it from the Golden Gate bridge.

Here in the US, we scrap 400 million electronics products a year and generated 2.6 million tons of e-waste in 2005, a figure now being dwarfed by modern statistics awaiting varification. That year a UN report exposed that up to 13 million metric tons of e-waste was being generated annually as people were more readily upgrading laptops and PCs and throwing out old models.

guiyu-largest-e-waste-site-on-earth-2.jpgExtracting precious metals from circuit boards

Metal extraction of circuit boards along with open dumping of waste and ash leaks residue into the open water and streams.

This has destroyed the well water and ground water of Guiyu, and has made it highly toxic and undrinkable for distant villages who also rely on the same water supply down stream.

A sad testament to his future

guiyu-largest-e-waste-site-on-earth-1.jpg

Undercover agents from Greenpeace collected water samples from the Jung River and surrounding streams for testing in Hong Kong and discovered lead content to be 190 times higher than safe level set by the World Health Organization.

guiyu-largest-e-waste-site-on-earth-3.jpgThis has been the cause of irreversible neurological damage among children as well as renal disease, cardiovascular effects and reproductive toxicity.

The official lead poisoning rate among children in Guiyu in 2006 was a crippling 70%, somthing that will plague them for the rest of their lives and rob survivors of any potential.

Circuit boards typically contain gold, silver and other precious metals and are easily extracted by heating causing a cloud of toxic eye watering pollution that permanently hangs over Guiyu.

No end in site – so what can be done?

With the scrap metal market booming and the rising value of recyclable circuit boards there is unlikely to be any end soon for Guiyu.

John Biggs at Crunch Gear in his article states “we should start talking with our wallets to the fools and damn fools who churn out piece after piece of quickly obsolete electronics.

I don’t know the answer to the problem, friends, but fully recyclable electronics is definitely a start.”

I agree it’s a start, but we’re a long way from this goal, which is hindered more by feasible technology solutions than anything else. Trade 2 save will target the pre-owned electronics market to encourage consumers to sell or trade-in their used computers, video cards and memory as well as cell phones, gaming and movies and also to buy pre-owned too when they can.

In the meantime we could also think about how often we need to upgrade and when we should consider buying pre-owned to reduce this mountain of e-waste and suffering.

Laptops for the masses have arrived!

Posted by on April 3, 2008 2 comments

2008cmpcstudent11.jpgI’ve been reading a lot of blog comments about these fantastic new laptops, the 2go from CTL and Intel which I believe will revolutionize computing around the world.

It’s portable – it’s rugged, it does what any other computer can do, and it’s cheap – this single product will have as much influence on the computer world as the model T.

It will bring computing to the masses, I mean the world masses.

And it will put their young citizens on the map for the first time.

Because with these computers, they’ll grow up to become as valuable a commodity as the Ivy league preps living it up in SV.

Soon it won’t be just Indian or Russian outsourcing for top notch programmers, it’ll be programmers from the Gambia, Sierra Lione, Angola or Mali. 2genclassmate_group-440.jpg

It was Bill’s dream to have a computer in every hut or household, what he didn’t reckon on was that the computers that will start this revolution will most likely run on a Linux variant. Vista is just too expensive for the purposes of progress.

2genclassmate_closed.jpgThese laptops are priced at just $500, and once a lot of them are second hand in a year or so, millions of them could be shipped over to the third world for $50 a piece.

Computers have been around for a while, but this is truly the start of the real computer revolution.

The Intel designed computer offers different choices to manufacturers so each can tailor laptop models for a variety of education needs.

The new classmate PC blueprint is the latest innovation and educational tool for parents and teachers to use technology, computers and Internet access to better educate students around the world.

Only 5 percent of the world’s children today have access to a PC or to the Internet,” Andrew Chien, Intel vice president said at the Intel Development Forum in Shanghai today.

Another way of ensuring that more of the world has access to affordable PCs is through the pre-owned and used market. Buying used computers and selling or trading consumer electronics that people no longer use is a sure fire way to ensure that people down the line get access to technology that is still up to date and useful.

Education is one of the best examples of how technology improves our lives.

We have seen how technology helps teachers create fun learning experiences more efficiently.

We have also been touched by children’s excitement when they are inspired by technology.

The Intel-powered classmate PC is one of the ways we support the IT industry in spreading the benefits of technology in education for children around the world.”

Craigslist thieves highlight public’s vulnerability

Posted by on April 1, 2008 Comments Off

We’ve all been stung on Craigslist or eBay – an iPod that turns up without the insides, or nothing turns up at all – these so called harmless little frauds that go on thousands of times a day which no one really talks about (it’s a fact that most people would prefer not to admit that they’d been duped in such a way)

thieves.jpgBut more recently, some particularly nasty things have been happening. Nancy Grace recently highlighted the tragic case of a nanny going missing after answering an ad in Craigslist, and now the couple here who have been caught out thanks to their ignorance of thinking they could get away with a crime and not get traced via their IP address.

Just to recall, Brandon and Amber Herbert placed an ad in Craigslist which said that all the belongings at a house were free for the taking – they then joined in with others to claim goods.

Though this is a comical end to a particularly nasty hoax, the fact remains that the public at large are extremely vulnerable to crime that takes place as a matter of course on auctions sites like eBay, and yes even Craigslist.

The pre-owned industry on the internet would be vastly bigger if there were any effective measures to protect us from con merchants who have now made the art of a con into a multi-million dollar online business.

Perhaps if the portals (who are worth billions) were made responsible for fraud that took place on their sites (like an online retailer would be responsible if they sold you something, took your money and it never showed up).

I think they would be spending much more time trying to solve the issue which has done nothing but escalated exponentially over the last few years.

In an era when the public should be encouraged to be greener and buy pre-owned products, it’s hardly surprising that the market is so tiny compared to the new market.

People have got to feel more confident about online pre-owned purchases if they are to start doing it regularly. The second hand car market would never have taken off in this state.

When we launch trade 2 save will be attempting to increase confidence in the pre-owned electronics market by acting as a retailer as opposed to a third party portal who have no legal obligations to either sellers or buyers. Customers will be able to buy, sell and trade Games, DVDs, consumer electronics and Computer Hardware, confident that they aren’t subject to a scam.

trade 2 save will buy the products, test them and grade them, and then sell them on as pre-owned with a store warranty that customers will be able to trust.

With eBay and Craigslist having done so little over the past decade to tidy up their acts, it could well be that customers start turning to a new breed of pre-owned online retailer who they can trust and save money with.