Unplug your charger

A battery charger or power adapter converts the high voltage electricity from a wall outlet to the low voltage power used to recharge the batteries in devices like cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, digital cameras, laptops, and camcorders. But many models are very inefficient, turning much of the energy they draw into heat (which is why your charger may be warm to the touch even if not in charge mode.)

Find it! Helpful tools for cutting phantom loads from cell phones

Want to ensure that you're not wasting energy unnecessarily? Buy an ENERGY STAR charger, or consider a solar charger, or a device that includes audio alerts that remind you to unplug the charger when your battery is full.

Unplugging your charger helps you go green because …

A typical US household uses between five to ten adapters/chargers, and each year, more than one billion new adapters are shipped worldwide.[1]

Only five percent of the total power consumed by a charger is used to juice up a cell phone, smartphone, or PDA.[2] Even while charging, 10 to 16 times more energy is often drawn from the outlet than can be retrieved by the batteries, which means the efficiency for many cell phones is as low as six to 20 percent.[3] The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that if every phone sold in the US in 2007 used ENERGY STAR qualified chargers, which are 40 percent more efficient than standard chargers, the energy saved would prevent over one million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the equivalent emissions of more than 200,000 cars, and could light 760,000 homes per year.[4][5] Additional national annual savings include 4.5 billion kWh of electricity use, three million tons of carbon dioxide from power plant emissions, and $380 million dollars on the end users' electricity bill.[3]

External links

• BRDA Parasite Charger: Innovative, design-forward charger designed by Swedish design team BRDA is not currently available for purchase.
• ENERGY STAR
• Federal Electronics Challenge

Footnotes

1. ENERGY STAR - External Power Adapters
2. TreeHugger - Unplug Your Cell Phone Charger
3. Natural Resources Defense Council - Battery Chargers and Energy Efficiency: Summary of Findings and Recommendations
4. TreeHugger - Motorola 100 Percent ENERGY STAR Certified
5. Gadgetell - Motorola's Phone Chargers First to be Energy Star Certified