Recycling used electronics is pretty important – arguably more important than recycling paper and plastic. E-waste is loaded with toxic heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium. Such chemicals are bad for the environment, but worse for the impoverished citizens of developing countries who all too often need to earn their living by crudely mining valuable metals out of our discarded computers, TVs and cell phones.

It’s a good thing, then, that Radio Shack is offering some decent incentives to recycle your old iPod. They are starting a program which allows customers to register their obsolete gadgets and ship them (pre-paid, of course) to a collecting location, where they make sure your item is in the condition you said it was. If so, you get a Radio Shack gift certificate (hey, I never said there was nothing in it for them). You can appraise your item online.

Radio Shack is certainly not the first to come up with this recycling model; others are doing very similar things. And seeing as getting a bit of cash for an old cell phone makes so much more sense than throwing it into a bin with banana peels and coffee filters, this ecogeek is optimistic about e-recycling becoming the norm.

Via GoodCleanTech
Image via Radio Shack

Alkaline batteries – they are so small and commonplace that it becomes easy to throw them away without a second thought. But they often still have some perfectly good juice left in them – often .8 to 1.3 volts! Yanko Design, an online design magazine, has come up with a great idea for discarded batteries: combine their power into something useful.

To that end, Yanko has designed The Energy Seed - an LED lamppost that is powered by discarded alkaline batteries. It only takes 2 volts to light up an LED lamp and if enough discarded batteries are inserted into specific slots for different sizes, their combined power will keep the lamp shining. In the poetic words of the Energy Seed motto, “trashed batteries can be born again as a seed to blossom light.”

Seoul designer Sung Woo Park along with co-creator Sunhee Kim designed the prototype which is shaped like a flower in a pot. This flower-like lamp can be placed on, say, a public sidewalk where people can walk up and put their old batteries into the slots. It almost feels like seeding a plant! And once the batteries are completely drained, they are conveniently centralized into one place – to be picked up for recycling.

Via Gizmodo, Yanko Design