Green Wombat

GreenCitizen, the San Francisco Bay Area electronics recycler, recently launched an online classifieds service to hook up people wanting to donate or sell old computers and other gear with non-profits and those who can’t afford to buy the latest iMac. The idea: extend the life of yesterday’s computers and cell phones rather than throw them on the ever-growing electronic waste heap. So far, the service appears to be off to a slow start but the idea is on the money.

Silicon Valley-based GreenCitizen takes a TreeHugger approach to an environmental business usually associated with the smokestack side of town: make it hip, understandable and convenient. Today, I walked over to GreenCitizen’s downtown San Francisco store (my cruddy cell phone photo above) and dropped off a circa 1999 laptop for recycling. More a boutique than a junkyard, the stylishly designed store sells T-shirts, shopping bags and coffee mugs alongside information on the 3 billion gadgets that will be discarded annually by 2010. Glenn Fajardo, director of the company’s drop-off centers, took the laptop off my hands and explained that GreenCitizen will track the ancient Toshiba to ensure that it’s recycled properly and not put on some scrap ship destined for a Third World landfill. Speaking of a company that knows a thing or two about stylish marketing, Virgin Mobile today began providing postage-paid recycling envelopes with every cell phone it sells. My colleague Michal Lev-Ram reports on Third Screen that when consumers’ current phone becomes hopelessly uncool – say in about six months – they just drop the old handset in the post and Virgin will take care of the rest.