Power mobile devices with a hand crank or solar charger

A must-have for outdoor adventurers, harried business travelers, and gadget-loving hipsters, a portable renewable energy source allows users to power up mobile devices, laptop, MP3 players, GPS‰ÛÒalmost any portable electronic device‰ÛÒwithout plugging into a wall outlet. Today, these power sources primarily include solar power and, to a lesser extent, mechanical (hand crank) power.

Find it! Renewable energy chargers

A solar or hand crank charger will juice up your gadgets in the cleanest way possible: with no harmful byproducts or environmental threats. For green gadgets galore head to Earth Tech Products.

Buying a hand crank or solar charger for your mobile devices helps you go green because…

• Only 5 percent of the power consumed by standard wall chargers is actually used to charge a cell phone.[1]
• Each year, the earth receives 6,000 times the amount of energy from the sun that people actually consume.[2]

Portable electronics are rapidly replacing those that run solely off a wall outlet: cell phones are replacing landlines, more than 20 percent of all PDAs are winning out over increasingly archaic paper organizers.[3] A typical US household uses between five to 10 adapters, and each year, more than 1 billion new adapters are shipped worldwide.[4]

Cell phones charging through a wall outlet are highly inefficient as 10 to 16 times more energy is often drawn from the outlet than can be retrieved by the batteries.[3] If everyone in the US unplugged their charger or used a more energy-efficient or renewably-powered charger, we could save 4.5 billion kWh of electricity use, 3 million tons of carbon dioxide from power plant emissions, and $380 million in end user electricity usage per year.[3]

External links

• Konarka
• Nanosolar
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• Solar America Initiative
• Solar Energy Industries Association

Footnotes

1. TreeHugger - Unplug Your Cellphone Charger
2. Wired - Reality Check: The Future of Solar Energy
3. Natural Resources Defense Council - Battery Chargers and Energy Efficiency: Summary of Findings and Recommendations
4. ENERGY STAR - External Power Adapters