Mark: Hey, I'm Mark Licea and this week, Sears pays you to recycle. A designer wants to teach your little ones to save energy. And why you should recycle your old ink jet cartridges. The Green Show, starts now.
Are you waiting for an EPA approved way to recycle your old TV? The US environmental protection agency held their first TV recycling challenge this year. The electronic manufacturers recycling management company or MRM won that challenge. MRM was founded by Panasonic, sharp, and Toshiba. The company have a recycling program that allows consumers to drop off their old junkers at designated stops. From there, they get shipped to recycling locations where the electronics are strip and separated before being built into new products.
MRM sent a short video from the process of recycling old CRTs.
Male: Upon arrival at recycle locations, the palettes of CRTs are unloaded and moved into warehouses by trained workers. The individual CRT units are then taken to a conveyor line for initial processing. This labor intensive process includes scraping off fasteners and other materials from the back to the CRT funnel tube.
The circuit boards removed from the TVs are generally shredded or put through a process which separates them in to plastic and metal fractions. The remaining glass CRTs are place back on the conveyor belts and crushed into small pieces known as CRT cullet. Quality control includes manual separation of panel and panel glass that may have been missed in the automated process.
Next, the cullet is place into large bags and is loaded into trucks for final shipment to a CRT glass manufacturer. Where this furnace ready cullet is melted and made into new CRT glass components.
Mark: You can find the list of the drop off sites to bring all your old TVs and consumer electronics at MRMrecycling.com.
Now, if you want to be rewarded for recycling. Sears launch a trade in program where customers can exchange their used products for a Sears gift card. Sears’ partnering up with online recycler Gazelle to accept more than 20 categories like cell phones, laptops and mp3 players. You can have your products evaluated at Sears.gazelle.com and shipping is free. You can also recycle non-working items, you just won't get money. K-Mart is also doing something similar as part of a test. In the next few weeks, customers can trade in their CDs, DVDs, and blu-ray discs at K-Mart in exchange for store credits. You won't get rich off your old CDs, but its incentive enough to recycle them.
Starbucks wants to save on their electric bill, the mega coffee retailer is switching to LED lighting in 8000 of its stores. The company teamed up with GE to design bulbs that fit with the company’s aesthetic design. Starbuck says the switch will save them 10% in electricity consumption, and their goal by the end of next year is to cut total energy usage by 25%. They could start by lowering the temperature of their hot water, just a little bit.
Here's a cute way to color code your kid’s energy usage. Red means bad, and green means, well green according to Theo. Designer Tim Holly traded the educational lights switch timer that looks like a ghost. Theo smiles when the lights have been on for short amount of time and gets angry if the lights are on for too long. Helps put being green in to perspective for the little ones. You could also teach your child that keeping Theo happy will help send them to college.
Moving right along, recycle your old ink jet cartridges. Then companies like Lex Mark will create cool products from them. Lex Mark teamed up with a company called Close the Loop, to produce a very special pen. The pen itself is made out of recycled ink jet cartridges and the ink in the pen is left over ink from the recycled cartridges.
Jim: We were able to save, now we made a pen, we've made a pen with recycled ink. We made the pen out of recycled plastic. Well we make that plastic, the plastic we get from ink jet cartridges. So we were able to take Lex Mark ink, Lex Mark plastic and come up with a pen.
Mark: You refill this same pen with a special ink cartridge. So you're not throwing pen after pen away in the trash. Now this isn’t commercially available nor is it hi-tech, but it’s a good idea. Everybody uses pens. That’s it for this week, send your feed back to greenshow@cnet.com. I'm Mark Licea, thanks for watching.
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