Recycle your technology

If you have an old cell phone or smartphone that you can donate for a good cause, that’s a wonderful place to start. Carrier Verizon, for example, has a program where your donation aids victims of domestic violence. It’s safe to recycle or donate smartphones, just be sure to wipe the device and take out the memory card first!

For those of us who work from home, many of us have printers and accumulate empty printer cartridges that can pile up. You don’t want those to end up in a landfill, though sadly, millions do…to the tone (sorry for the pun) of 350 million a year, according to Cartridge World. So please contact your equipment manufacturers about recycling programs. For example, HP has a robust program.

In the UK, Recycle4charity is an initiative that works with dozens of charities to generate donations from recycling old mobiles and printer cartridges.

For more advice on recycling technology check out CNet’s latest report. And, iRecycle by Earth911 is a free app on both Android and iOS that details more than 1,600,000 ways to recycle more than 350 materials.

There's an app for that…

An ever-growing number of eco-friendly apps out there can help us protect the planet. By one estimate from IBM’s Smarter Planet there were 400 million green-related apps downloaded in 2014. That’s a lot of apps!

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Monitor & reduce your energy consumption. By now, most people are familiar with the Nest thermostat to monitor and control your home thermostat. But there are many other examples such as The Wiser Energy Management System, by Schneider Electric. It’s a home energy management solution that lets you track and control your energy expenditures (and thus your costs).

• Eliminate junk mail. How often do you find your mailbox still cluttered with junk mail? PaperKarma by Reputation.com is a free app that allows you to take a picture of the unwanted mail, and then handles it from there, contacting the distributor and cancelling further contact.

• Travel energy-wise. Carma Carpool is an app available for free to cut down on costs, traffic jams, greenhouse gas emissions and overall pollution. Carma enables you to find rides and share your commute in many major cities in the U.S. and Ireland, as well as Oslo. It’s also a great way to use the Diamond lane, and the San Francisco Bay Area you get free tolls!

• Shop eco-wise. Many of us also like to shop for eco-friendly products in environmentally friendly stores. GoodGuides, which I’ve mentioned before, is a free app that helps you find health, environmental, and social performance ratings for over 120,000 food, personal care, and household products — from baby shampoo to bathroom cleaner.

• Get the game. Finally, the Earth Day Network has announced it will work developers of the "Angry Birds" game to create a game experience, called “Champions for Earth” to raise environmental awareness. Stay tuned. The game is due out in the fall.

I hope some of these ideas will help inspire you to celebrate Earth Day this Wednesday and every day.