Tag: RECYCLING

In an effort to find a convenient and profitable way to recycle discarded electronics, ecoATM has raised more than $14 million to place eCycling kiosks in stores across the U.S. Each kiosk pays people who recycle their e-waste by giving them either cash or coupons from the store where the machine is located. All you have to do is drop off that old BlackBerry, iPod or other device at the kiosk. The ...

Much of the product design coming out of Art Lebedev Studio has been bold, but of questionable taste. Remember those ridiculous Optimus keyboards? Shudder. But this concept for disposable thumbdrives, designed by Alexei Lyapunov and Lena Ehrlich, is both realistic and restrained. Called Fleshkus, the drives are made of cardboard and not meant to last. Let's hope they eventually make it to ...

Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on the sale of Four Loko, what's there to do with all the excess product? According to an Associated Press report, MXI Environmental Services, a waste-management company in Virginia, has been buying truckloads of the caffeinated malt beverage, and will recycle it to get pure ethanol. That's right, the alcoholic energy drink that used ...

Taking your laptop in for repair typically involves long lines, condescending tech support workers and hefty bills. With a new prototype laptop called Bloom, however, conducting open hard-drive surgery is so easy, a 10-year-old could do it. Created by a group of students from Stanford and Finland's Aalto University, Bloom can be completely disassembled within just two minutes, and with ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never move from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over their creations, nevertheless. Last ...

As befits the tech-blogger lifestyle, we have piles of aging gadgets lying around. And, while many of them could potentially net us a few bucks on eBay, we're usually too lazy to put together a listing, post photos, and actually ship the small mountain of junk to the people willing to pay for it. But eBay doesn't want you to let your tech castaways gather dust, so the auction site has just ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never move from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over their creations, nevertheless. Can you ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. This week saw ...

Warning to our Cleveland Switched readers: be extra vigilant about separating your recyclables. A new program being launched in the Ohio city will distribute 25,000 RFID-equipped recycling bins to residents. The tagged cans will be used to track how often a household takes its recycling to the curb. Fail to toss the recycling often enough, and you'll trigger a garbage audit. Your trash will be ...

A boat constructed from thousands of plastic bottles has completed its journey across the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco to Sydney Harbor. According to Popular Science, the Plastiki, which is a catamaran made from about 12,500 plastic bottles, sailed more than 9,000 miles in four months to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- a pile of waste the size of Texas that's floating ...

If you pay exorbitant amounts for ink cartridges, you might as well make sure they go to good use, right? That's exactly what Australia's National Park Service has decided to do -- by utilizing used cartridges to create a 347 mile (170 kilometer) bike path between Alice Springs and Simpsons Gap in the Northwest Territory. Australian company Repeat Plastics Australia is constructing the trail out ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. We're not trying to take sides in this whole Apple vs. Adobe battle. We do limit our weekly time-wasters to Flash-based games, because, well, they're endlessly ...

A British man has patched together a Frankenstein car that's just as green as the monster itself. According to The Daily Mail, Buzz Knapp-Fisher's 'Womble Truck,' named after a kid's TV show about recycling, is made from the parts of 21 different vehicles, and runs entirely on french fry fat and vegetable oil. Knapp-Fisher, a sculptor and environmentalist, purchased the original wrecked frame for ...

You might not know it, but it's National Cell Phone Recycling Week. From April 5th through 11th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is encouraging consumers to recycle all those old cell phones that are just laying around the house. According to NPR, Americans toss out about 130 million cell phones every year. Now, there are some intrepid folks out there fighting the battle against e-waste, ...

At just 16-years old, Rhode Island teen Alex Lin has leaped to the forefront of the e-waste dilemma. According to Take Part, Lin has overseen the recycling of more than 300,000 pounds of discarded electronics through legislation, recycling programs, computer-refurbishing centers and plain old hard work. We've told you before about the mounting problem of disposing old computers, cell phones and ...