Join CWSD at TSRI GREEN FEAT 2010

Posted in: Conservation, blog by Jack on 15 April 2010

Come on out and join us in showing your support for Mother Earth at Scripps today from 11AM to 1PM.

TSRI Green Team is pleased to announce TSRI Green Feat 2010 “Reducing Footprints, One Step at a Time”—A 2-day event promoting environmentally sustainable efforts and practices within the TSRI community and commemorating the 41st annual Earth Day.

Day 1: April 15, 2010
Day 2: April 21, 2010

Day 1: Green Expo

TSRI’s Green Expo promotes green thinking, green action, and green living within the TSRI community. Commemorating the 41st Earth Day Celebration, this event serves to provide our institute’s researchers and support staff an opportunity to learn more about our campus’s sustainability efforts and accomplishments; green purchasing decisions for work and home; local environmental education, outreach, and volunteer programs; and the current evidence and effects of climate change in the San Diego area.

Date: Thursday, April 15, 2010

Hours: 11:00am to 1:00pm.

Location: Immunology Building Breezeway.

We’ll be at table #2 providing answers to your questions and handing out our new (and colorful) reusable shopping bags. We are joined by the following companies and groups:

Bottlehood
California Center for Sustainable Energy
Chipotle
Clean Energy Quotes, Inc.
City of San Diego Water Conservation
EDCO
Family Adventures in Nature
H2OME
Hydro-Scape Products
I Love a Clean San Diego (HHW)
Jimbos
NCTD Transit Alliance
San Diego Credit Union
SANDAG
Seabreeze Organic Farm
Sempra/SDG&E/Flex Your Power
Birch Aquarium/Scripps Institute of Oceanography
TerraMoto
Think Blue San Diego
Water Conservation Garden
San Diego County Water Authority
San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project

If you have any personal electronics you want to recycle, Scripps is hosting a recycling drive tomorrow:

Electronic waste or “E-waste” is one of the fastest growing segments of our nation’s waste stream. Most electronic devices contain a variety of materials, including metals that can be recovered for recycling. Some electronic devices contain high levels of certain materials, such as lead, that render them hazardous waste when disposed. Recycling your e-waste will divert hazardous materials from landfills, conserve natural resources, and reduce pollution.

When: Wednesday, April 21st from 8:00am to 1:00pm

Where: CimBio (Carr B), 3215 Merryfield Row, San Diego, CA 92121

What: Personal home office electronic waste including computer devices (terminals, monitors, keyboards, wires, etc.), laptops (batteries included), scanners, printers, fax machines, radios and stereo equipment, VCR’s and DVD players, TV’s, and cellphones (batteries included).

For those unfamiliar with the location of the Carr B building it can be found in the lower right hand corner of the TSRI campus map and
is labeled “Center for Integrative Molecular Biosciences”.

TSRI campus map can be found here:
http://www.scripps.edu/intro/tsrimap.pdf

For more information contact:
Julio Giannotti (x4-8462, julio@scripps.edu)
David Hinton (x4-2291, djhinton@scripps.edu)

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Recycle Safely

Posted in: Security, blog by Jack on 30 December 2009

Image via Wikipedia

Did Santa bring you a new fax machine or computer for Christmas? Are you planning on recycling or donating your old machine?

Here are a couple of security-related issues for your consideration.

Fax machines that use a film, as opposed to an ink or toner cartridge, retain an image of every fax the machine has reproduced. Think of the film as a long roll of carbon paper (those of you, like me, old enough to remember carbon paper). A perfectly readable image of every received fax is preserved on that roll of film. A discarded fax film is a goldmine for identity thieves.

We strongly recommend you destroy the used fax film. However, we have not yet identified the most effective way to do that. I’m not sure that feeding it through a paper shredder would work; in fact it may jam the cutting teeth of the shredder. Burning it is probably not an option, at least in the incorporated parts of San Diego. If your business uses the services of a document destruction company, I would suggest adding your fax roll to the bags of documents awaiting destruction. If that is not an option, perhaps soaking the roll of film in a can of gasoline or bleach will make it unreadable.

If anyone can offer a better or more practical solution, please let us all know in the comments.

It is perhaps more obvious that if you plan on recycling your old computer, you should first remove and then destroy the hard drive, unless you plan on using that drive again in your new computer or as an external drive (cases for this can be purchased from retailers like geeks.com for less than $20).

What may not be as obvious is that simply deleting the content on your hard drive isn’t sufficient. It’s not all that hard to reconstruct deleted data from a hard drive.

This is because when you delete something, you aren’t actually erasing that content. You’re merely erasing the marker that tells the operating system where to find that data on the disk. It’s as if you removed all the house numbers from a block of houses. The houses are still there but an individual house would now be hard to find if all you had to go on was the address. Forensic software can even recover data that has been over-written. There are software companies that sell applications that promise to delete your data “to military specifications”. Sounds pretty good, but the military doesn’t have a single set of specifications for data destruction.

• Clearing: Eradicating data to the extent that information cannot be retrieved through normal operation but may be salvaged in a laboratory.

•Sanitizing/purging: Removing data to a degree that it is beyond the reach of all ordinary and most laboratory recovery methods. This includes degaussing, which employs a special coil tool to demagnetize a drive’s magnetic media, scrambling all contents in the disk.

•Destroying: Disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or melt.

Software and/or hardware can perform either of the first two types of deletion, but why spend $30 or more when you can perform that last type of data destruction yourself? All you need is a hammer. The other advantage to this technique is that it’s a great stress reliever. Remove the hard drive from the computer, place it on concrete or some other resistant material and smash the case as much as you can. Your goal is to break the disks inside the case. That should make the drive completely unreadable by even the most advanced forensic software. Then the drive should be safe to recycle with other electronics.

One last suggestion for protecting your information as 2010 rolls around: I know several people who celebrate New Years by shredding all their old paperwork, receipts, bills and correspondence. They keep 3-5 years of archived paperwork and everything older gets shredded. But even shredded paper can be reconstructed by someone determined to do so. If you throw shredded documents out in the trash, consider pouring some liquid into the bag with it to cause the ink to run and make each strip harder to read, or use that bag for used kitty litter. Put the trash out just before pickup to deny someone the chance to get access to it. In most states, once you put your trash can on the curb you no longer have property rights over it. Anyone can go through your trash looking for personal data that will let them borrow your identity.

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Recycling is great, but reusing might be better

Posted in: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle, blog by Jack on 28 December 2009

In our daily lives reuse is often more practical and more beneficial than tossing items in the recycling bin. The following article from NorthJersey.com explains the benefits of reuse and provides easy ways to practice it.

After decades of emphasizing recycling, environmental advocates and climate-change experts are now shifting their focus a bit: Instead of tossing used receptacles into a recycling bin — where it takes energy to haul them away and even more to process them into new products — they’re stressing it’s better to use them again and again.

The concept is not new. Environmental advocates’ mantra has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” — but now there is a growing emphasis on reducing by reusing items more than once.

That not only means bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, but also using cloth napkins instead of paper, turning old clothes into cleaning rags, and instead of buying prepackaged deli snacks for lunch, sending children to school with a sandwich in a container that can be used over and over.

“You use 90 percent less energy to take an aluminum can and make it into a new can through recycling than if you had to mine bauxite to make aluminum and make a new can, so recycling is still important,” said Jeff Tittel, director of New Jersey Sierra Club. “But reuse has become much more the environmental trend for a lot of people because you don’t need to use the energy for recycling.”

“One by one, what we buy, or how we buy things, will make a difference,” Tittel said. “So by reusing canvas bags, it means you are not using oil and other things to make plastic bags that are not going to spend an eternity in a landfill.

By reusing containers it saves on energy, it saves on our carbon footprint and it saves in landfills, which also cause a lot of pollution. So it’s a good, simple way to lower your carbon footprint and help the environment.”

Other solutions are just as simple.

Stop serving bottled water at catered events and public meetings, suggests Randall Solomon, executive director of the Sustainable State Institute at Rutgers University. Instead, put out pitchers of water to serve in glasses.

“You don’t have to be super radical to make a huge difference,” Solomon said.

One of the recommendations in a greenhouse-gas report released last week by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection also emphasizes the need to reduce and reuse — not only recycle.

“The more scientific information that we get, we are realizing the importance of reduce and reuse along with recycling,” said DEP spokeswoman Elaine Makatura.

So before you recycle, consider if the item you’re getting rid of could possibly be reused.

Do you have other suggestions for ways in which we can better practice reuse? If so, please mention them in the comments.

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Upcoming Recycling Event @ Recycle San Diego

Posted in: Recycling, blog by Jack on 14 December 2009

FREE eWASTE DROP OFF EVENT – SAN DIEGO
Saturday, December 19, 2009
10am-2pm
Recycle San Diego Parking Lot
8222 Ronson Road, San Diego, CA 92111

Recycle San Diego is hosting a FREE electronics recycling event which is open to the general public. Bring any amount of eWASTE to have it recycled for free.

Do you need to find a place on your desk for your new printer or wonder what to do with that 3 year old computer? Drop them off at Recycle San Diego this coming Saturday.

Please read their website carefully to see what they will and won’t accept. Also note that businesses are charged for this service, so despite the site saying that “any amount” of eWaste is accepted, too much of any one item may result in your paying for recycling.

Still, this is a far better solution than dumping your unwanted electronics in the trash.

Rethinking Recycling

Posted in: Recycling, blog by Jack on 7 December 2009

No, not in general. We still encourage everyone to recycle, reuse, reduce and, especially at this time of year, regift.

What we do have to rethink is our offer to recycle our customer’s printers, faxes, computers and monitors for them. We wanted to provide this service as a free way to ensure your electronics were recycled properly.  We would take customer’s unwanted, unneeded and broken electronics then, when we got to around 20 devices, we would call a local agency to pick them up. We worked with agencies that used the printers to train people in repair and then supplied the working machines to low-income and military families.

Unfortunately the number of agencies involved in this effort is shrinking, and those that remain are getting more selective about what they’ll accept. For instance, the Salvation Army will only take computers less than 4 years old, the very type of machine unlikely to be offered for recycling.

We thought we’d found the perfect partner in our efforts to keep printers and computers out of the landfill in a local company called Recycle San Diego. I just posted about a weekend drive they were having for electronics. That’s where I took all our accumulated printers Saturday.

Evidently this reoccurring drive is free to households, people who have a printer or a computer they want to recycle.  When you pull in like I did with 20+ printers in the back of your truck you’re considered a business (fair enough, we are, after all) and businesses pay 20¢ a pound to recycle printers. So recycling our customer’s printers Saturday cost us $20.

Had our customers brought their own printers to Recycle San Diego on Saturday instead of bringing them to our store, they would have been able to freely recycle them.

So as much as I regret doing anything that might in any way discourage recycling, from this point on we are going to start encouraging our customers to take their electronics directly to Recycle San Diego on the weekends they hold their drives and not to bring them to us. This will ensure the electronics get recycled without costing either of us anything.

I’ll make a point to post upcoming recycling drives in advance and will have that information available in the store. We want to encourage everyone to properly dispose of their unwanted electronics, we just can’t afford to subsidize that effort every month.

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Upcoming e-waste recycling events

Posted in: Recycling, blog by Jack on 2 December 2009

Our friends at Recycle San Diego are continuing to host e-waste recycling events.

You can keep up on all their future recycling drives by visiting their website.

We encourage you to take any electronics you no longer need or use to this event and allow them to be properly recycled.

Recycling personal electronics

Posted in: Recycling, blog by Jack on 19 July 2009

Many of our customers ask about recycling their old and unused personal electronics like cell phones and MP3 players.

A new player in the recycling market has an answer. Introducing YouRenew.

Everyday, thousands of people buy and sell electronics. But sooner or later, that new cell phone, mp3 player or other gadget becomes outdated. Unfortunately, there aren’t many places where you can recycle electronics easily, which results in too many electronics ending up in landfills. We’re here to change that.

We’re on a mission to make the planet a better place and provide an easy way for you to sell electronics. We’ve taken away all the hassle associated with selling or recycling your old devices: no accounts, no credit cards, no fees and no shipping costs. Electronics recycling has never been easier!

YouRenew.com is the perfect place for you to recycle or sell used cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras and graphing calculators. You can also recycle and sell laptops, video game console, external hard drive, video game or DVD. If you can’t find your device in our catalogue or we can’t pay for it, you can always ship it for free and we’ll recycle it safely. So look up your device today, go green and get green! So look up your device today and go green!

Here at YouRenew, we know that reuse is the highest form of recycling, because every item that is reused means one fewer needs to be created. That’s why we strive to prolong the life of functioning electronics that we receive by putting them back to use. If your device is beyond repair, we ensure that it’s recycled in the most environmentally conscious manner possible. No devices we touch go to a landfill and we do not export e-waste. All physical recycling takes place in the U.S.

Follow these simple steps to sell or recycle your used electronics: (1) search for your device, (2) answer a few questions that help us make you an accurate offer, (3) check out and get free shipping!

If your device is worth $0, ship it to us for free and we’ll make sure that it is 100% recycled.

I don’t see how any recycler could make it any easier for us to dispose of our unwanted electronics.

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Cartridge Exchanges

Posted in: Recycling, blog, store by Jack on 11 June 2009

Some of our new customers get confused about how we work, especially when it comes to exchanging cartridges. Let me see if I can clarify how it works.

When you buy a refilled or remanufactured cartridge from us, we need to replace the cartridge you’re buying in order to keep our prices as low as they are.

One way for us to replenish our stock of empty cartridges is to buy them from brokers or our customers. We generally pay $1 for empty ink cartridges and $3 for empty laser cartridges.

If you come in to buy a cartridge without an empty one to exchange, we have to add the cost of replacing that cartridge to your purchase. For example, if you’re buying an HP 56 black ink cartridge without an exchange, the cost to you is $12.99, a dollar more than it would be with an empty cartridge to exchange. If you bought an HP Laserjet 2600 cartridge for $49.99 without an empty to exchange, the actual cost before tax would be $52.99 ($49.99 + $3 core charge).

It’s really no different than when you buy a car battery. Without an old battery to exchange for the core, a core charge is added on in order to replace the battery you’re purchasing.

To encourage recycling, we also buy empty cartridges that are in good shape, are original cores and ones that we need. So if you came in to buy an HP 21 black ink cartridge and you had 3 empty cartridges with you, we would consider one to be an exchange for the one you’re buying and we’d give you an additional $2 off for the extra cartridges.

We don’t always purchase empty cartridges (in many cases we already have plenty of empty cores) but we are always willing to recycle any you have. This prevents them from winding up in our local landfill. We prefer to reuse cartridges, but if we can’t reuse we want to at least recycle.

If you ever have any questions regarding what we do or how we do it, and your questions aren’t answered on this website, please call us, send an email or drop by. We’d be happy to answer any question you may have.

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Recycle your unwanted electronics

Posted in: Printers, Recycling, San Diego, blog by Jack on 1 May 2009

Recycle San Diego is accepting electronics for recycling over the next two weekends.

FREE eWASTE DROP OFF EVENT – SAN DIEGO
Saturday, May 2, 2009
10am-1pm
Recycle San Diego Parking Lot
8222 Ronson Road, San Diego, CA 92111

Saturday, May 9, 2009
10am-1pm
Recycle San Diego Parking Lot
8222 Ronson Road, San Diego, CA 92111

Recycle San Diego is hosting a FREE electronics recycling event which is open to the general public. Bring any amount of eWASTE to have it recycled for free.

Directions to their facility and more information can be found on their website.

Cartridge World ‘Refills’ Its Commitment to Earth Day

Posted in: Conservation, Recycling, blog by Jack on 8 March 2009

Via FranchiseWire:

As a mountain of e-waste continues to steadily form throughout our nation’s landfills, Cartridge World reinforces its commitment to environmental awareness by saluting Earth Day on April 22 and joining the millions Americans across the country in creating eco-friendly choices for consumers and businesses alike.

“With Earth Day fast approaching, now is the perfect time of year to remind consumers of the ways to create a ‘green’ home and work environment,” said Steven Yeffa, President of Cartridge World Americas. “Recycling programs for cans, bottles and papers are mainstream, but few realize the additional impact they can make by reusing and refilling printer ink cartridges.”

“With our continued commitment to recycling, we look forward to the day when reusing and refilling cartridges is as common as separating waste materials in our homes,” Yeffa added, estimating that Cartridge World will keep nine million cartridges out of landfills this year.

Cartridge World recommends the following tips for an environmentally friendly home office/business:

Reuse & refill empty ink jet and toner cartridges

Use rewriteable CDs and DVDs so they can be reused again

Print double sided

Decrease margin areas to fit more copy on a page

Double-check your drafts before you print

Communicate with team members about who will bring printouts to meetings

Turn off all electrical equipment at night

In keeping with its dedication to implement green practices, Cartridge World has developed numerous programs to make recycling printer cartridges easier for consumers and businesses. In conjunction with this year’s observance of Earth Day, Cartridge World has launched a “Recycle it @ Cartridge World” campaign that encourages consumers to recycle printer cartridges and cell phones at participating stores. All collections will be sent to Clover Technologies Group, the largest collector and recycler of cartridges and cell phones, to be broken down and reused into other products.

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