If you decide to switch remember to recycle your old phone — Americans threw away an astounding 5.5 billion pounds of electronics — TVs, stereos, cell phones, and computers. It resulted in millions of pounds of chemicals and heavy metals ending up in the ground even though it’s easier than ever to recycle electronics. The Consumer Electronics Association created my green electronics to help people find a recycling resource in their area. The site also provides a list of electronics, from laptops to baby monitors, that are easier on the environment and your energy bill.

Well I just did it and my son is using the phone at college ~ looks like a really cool phone and now we’ll see how it works out! Canno pick the environmental group until a month!

Wow, I would love to switch, but the coverage here in bad. But we are dropping Verizon soon.

Wow about the anti-legislation rally. I’m really not surprised though. I have to admit I grew up in West Virginia and my grandfathers and my father (to this day) are coal miners.

While I personally do believe in green and clean energy, I really do feel it’s a two edged sword; especially for states like West Virginia. West Virginia is the third poorest state in the US and it’s economy is based on coal. Building things like solar farms and windmill farms are great and I admire them going up in my area of Ontario, but it’s not a source of continual work for people. Once they are up, it’s maintenance. Most of the workforce used to build these farms can be let go after the work is done.

I know we have to do something about the environment, but to tell the people of West Virginia apathetically that they cannot work and thus cannot feed their families isn’t the way. The government also needs to consider how they will protect the families in areas where this new legislation with destroy their economic foundations, which so far they have not offered feasible long-term solutions.

I know that was a bit off topic, but as someone who supports environmentalism, I like to raise this point for people to mull over. I’m glad you did change phone services as I would not want my money going to anti-clean energy rallies. I just think that these people are concerned they are not being offered any way to make a living in light of the government wishing them to stop mining.

From my husband, who works in industrial construction, there are other solutions that are being put to work in Ontario as we speak. As far back as ten years ago, Ontario began retrofitting already made coal and nuclear plants with scrubbers. These scrubbers (ones from ten years ago) prevent 95% of the carbon produced from being released into the air. I’m sure there are more effective ones by now, if not.. why are we not researching this? It would be vastly less expensive for us to retrofit plants than to build (and run) other forms of energy plants. Coal and nuclear can be clean if we make it clean.

The carbon that retained in the scrubbers are used to make things like pencils, paints, tires, asphalt, rubbers, etc. So we even have uses for the by-products.

Just my thoughts on the secondary issue of the article :)