What is the biggest toxic spill the US has ever experienced?

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A declaration that should have been made months ago, was finally made yesterday by the World Health Organization (WHO) from its Geneva headquarters. WHO officially declared the current outbreak of swine flu cases worldwide a pandemic. The declaration, prompted by the rapidly rising number of cases (close to 30,000) worldwide, will prompt drug manufacturers  to accelerate production of swine flu vaccine and force governments to increase funding in their efforts to control outbreaks.

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Stumbled upon this picture in the web today,  it’s called Mobile Evolution: Miniaturisation in the style of a Russian Doll by British artist Kyle Bean.

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In a move widely perceived as an effort to solidify its dominance in the US data phone market, Apple has unveiled the latest version of the hugely popular iPhone 3G series. The new model,  iPhone 3G S will be available in the US and in 80 different countries worldwide on June 19th, Friday of next week.

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In our recent post on fake recycling events uncovered by the Basel Action Network in Pennsylvania, we’ve noted that although it isn’t the industry norm yet, more and more electronic manufacturers are taking responsibility for the proper disposal of their products.  I believe this is the best solution to the deluge of e-waste that we have to deal with, next to a cradle-to-cradle type of solution. That’s why yesterday’s announcement by Dell is a most welcome development.

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I came across the concept of cradle-to-cradle recycling while doing research for our latest lens Recycling! Recycling!, now available for viewing at Squidoo. It’s basically a gateway lens to all of our recycling lenses. If you’re doing some research on Plastic Recycling, or Cell Phone Recycling, or E-Waste Recycling, for example, this new lens is a good place to start.

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The Basel Action Network (BAN) has uncovered another illegal scheme by unscrupulous recyclers, who were working through a legitimate organization to ship electronic waste to developing countries. Apparently, the company, tasked to handle the electronic waste, was working with the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society in collecting used electronic items from residents, promising to have the e-waste recycled here in the US.

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A few weeks ago, we announced in this blog that we’re forming a community in Facebook, the premiere social networking site today. Well, last week, we started inviting friends to join us in the group and today, we’re happy to observe that the group is growing quite fast. Hopefully, we will reach 500 members by the end of June.

You can view the group Old Cell Phones For Life in Facebook, if you haven’t checked it out yet. You need to log in to your Facebook account in order to view the page. Please visit the site today and become a member. We need your support.

As we wrote before, Old Cell Phones For Life is an initiative designed to help several great organizations (non-profit and charity) that we’re currently working with. These are groups like Feed The Children, the Salvation Army, and the American Cancer Society. Each of these organizations is working towards helping people facing different challenges in life - poverty, sickness, alcoholism, lack of education, hunger, natural disasters, etc. They all deserve our help.

Old cell phones sent to Pacebutler through the Donate To Charity page will be properly accounted for, and proceeds will be sent to these non-profits. If your favorite charity or non-profit organization is not included in the list, please feel free to contact us in this site or post in the boards at Old Cell Phone For Life, and we will work something out for your organization.

Facebook, now valued at $10 billion has the fastest growing membership today. It rivals Google in terms of daily searches, and is larger than any photo-sharing site in terms of images stored in its databases. That’s why we consider this group in Facebook to be a very important component in our effort to spread awareness of the importance of cell phone recycling.

Our vision is to ultimately have a member of the group coming from each town or county in America who will help us amplify our message. The goals are to help our partner organizations raise funds through cell phone donations, to educate the public on the positive environmental impact of cell phone recycling, and to increase significantly the cell phone recycling rate nationwide.

Again, please visit Old Cell Phones For Life and be a member today. Everyone is important to us, we will only realize our goals when enough people join this nascent initiative.

Image Credit: “Sarah’s New Phone” originally uploaded by user “Me and the Sysop” at Flickr and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License.

Sometimes, you just get to wonder at the depth of some people’s depravity and greed. In the news yesterday, the Department of Justice has reached a settlement with 2 fake charities that were operating nationwide - one was collecting cash on behalf of charitable organizations and the other was collecting cell phones that were supposed to benefit victims of domestic violence. It turned out, none of the phones reached the victims and the other company was pocketing more than 80% of the funds it collected for the aid groups.

Read the full story at the Statesman Journal.

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