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Put it in your bag, shake a leg, save the planetBy Steve Tanner | Tuesday, June 9, 2009 11:48 AM ET
Apple's celebrated iPhone is one of the most environmentally unfriendly portable devices ever created, according to Greenpeace. The seemingly magical, do-everything gizmo contains 10 percent bromine (a toxic flame retardant) by weight and other nasty secrets beneath its shiny façade, according to the environmental organization. Apple is not alone in its (allegedly) trashy ways, but it's important to note that Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson all have products free of bromine and PVCs. We're not saying you should necessarily dispose of your sexy uber-phone, and the toxic chemicals wouldn't go away even if you did, but there are other ways to green an arguably not-so-green product. For starters, you could pre-order an nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator) from Cleveland-based Tremont Electric, which generates up to 4 watts of electricity as you walk, run or even sit on the bus by converting kinetic energy into electricity. They're not yet available, but the company's Web site touts the PEG's ability to charge most portable devices up to 80 percent within one hour. The company claims that if everyone charged their portable devices with a PEG for an hour a day, the equivalent of 21,000 households-worth of annual energy use would be eliminated.
*EDITOR: This is a link to a pic of the device
http://www.greennpower.com/personalenergy
Steve Tanner is a freelance writer based in the Santa Cruz Mountains who got his start covering the meteoric rise and subsequent crash-landing of Silicon Valley’s dot-com experiment. |
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