If you caught Sunday night's episode of 60 Minutes, you were treated to not just an incredible example of journalism but also a gripping story about what happens to the personal computers and laptops we recycle--it's a tale that apparently often ends in Guiyu, China where you can't breathe the air without hacking, and most of the children have lead coursing through their blood. That's because in Guiyu, workers are paid $8 a day to dismantle electronic waste, and they use chemicals to burn away the plastic to extract the metals lodged in the equipment. And during this process, lead, mercury and polyvinyl chloride are released, all of which are all cancer-causing agents.

It was a great story, especially when CBS correspondent Scott Pelley confronted Brandon Richter, CEO of Executive Recycling in Englewood, Colorado. Richter had been interviewed, talking about the importance of safely recycling e-waste and his company's web site, according to 60 Minutes, had stressed that they never sent the laptops, monitors and other electronic equipment oversees. It was all done here in the United States (the web site makes no mention of that now).

Saturday will be the first day of the month, and with it, another raft of homeowners will be turned out on the streets as their untenable mortgages expire. Expect the usual moving mayhem that happens whenever the first of the month falls on a weekend: a shortage of moving trucks, jammed unloading zones at apartment buildings, and a run on cardboard boxes.

One California company is doing a little something to make the difficulty easier. For this move cycle, UsedCardboardBoxes.com is giving free moving boxes to anyone who has lost their home in a foreclosure. The point, of course, is to promote the outfit's products, which are boxes that have been used, misprinted, or overstocked but are otherwise perfectly good.

The freebie pack of boxes, normally $38, includes sixteen boxes of various sizes, a roll of tape, a stack of packing paper, a marker, and a box cutter. To get that, you have to call the company (888-269-3788), provide proof of foreclosure, and pay for shipping, which amounts to $15. (Shipping is usually free, so you're getting about $23 worth of gimmes in this arrangement.) The deadline to apply is Tuesday.

Introducing a regular-looking pizza box with a special touch. The difference is that the box can come apart once it's delivered by your local pie dealer. While it starts out the size of a standard pizza box, customers can break the platter-size square into four plate-size sections using scoring and perforations.

Voila--a trashy dinner service for four, with no wasting water or soap on dishes after. I guess that sorta makes this box "green," as the manufacturer claims. If annual pizza consumption numbers in the billions, as some theorize (though of course, some must be served on plates in restaurants), sure, this could have some effect if everyone used it. Okay, maybe the "green" angle is a slight stretch, but it's also true that no trees died for the box, either. It's made from 100% recycled material, which presumably can be recycled again after supper. Every little bit helps, right?

Does this picture look homey to you? Travelodge, one of Britain's primary hotel chains, has just opened a property in Uxbridge, in far west London, that's made almost entirely out of 86 shipping containers. Each room was pre-fabricated in China (where else?) with a built-in bathroom, shipped to England, and then stacked, as a BBC video story puts it, like "a giant Lego set."

The 120-room property, banged up in a scant 20 days, was then smoothed over to give it a unified look, much like your aunt might frost a layer cake. The trick works so well that the company is slapping up another one, this one more than twice as big, near London's Heathrow Airport, and about half of its future properties will be pressed from the same cookie-cutter mold.

I wouldn't say the place's industrial provenance is being sold as a gimmick or painted with the worn-out "green" brush. In fact, you'd never know you were sleeping in a former cargo hold, mostly because the hotel chain's rooms have never been very showy. Its battery-hen rooms are short on luxuries (plasma TV, yes; phone, no) and iffy on size (beds are king-size), but they're always defined by a dignified crispness. The pricing system is also simple: The more rooms that are available, they cheaper they are. If you book far enough in advance, rooms can be insanely affordable. For January, rooms can cost just £29 right now. That's about $50 a night.

In a worldwide survey cellphone maker Nokia found that only 3% of people have ever recycled a cell phone and nearly half had never heard of such a thing. That's pretty pathetic after the huge efforts by manufacturers, retailers, governments, environmental groups and charities to make sure cellphones don't end up in landfills, where they leak lead, mercury, cadmium and arsenic.

If all the 3 billion cell users worldwide recycled one phone (and on average we've gone through five), we would save 240,000 tons of raw material and cut the greenhouse gas equivalent of 4 million cars, Nokia Director of Environmental Affairs Markus Terho said in a statement. Some 85% of Nokia phones can be recycled. Some recycled cell phones go for parts and materials; others go to seniors or people in developing regions that might otherwise be cut off.

The big problem is that people just don't know what to do with their old phones. The survey of 6,500 people in 13 countries showed only 4% just threw them away. About 44% just kept them in a drawer with their other dead electronics. One fourth of us give them to somebody else and 16% try to sell them.

How many recycling containers do you have in your house? I think most families have at least two, one for glass and plastic, one for paper. Philadelphia is switching to a system that will only make you keep one bin for all your stuff. That will make Philly the largest city on the East Coast to go with single stream recycling.

Mayor Michael Nutter named July 7 "BINdependence Day." The system has been in trials in some neighborhoods since 2006, according to Waste News Report, increasing recycling in those areas by 35%.

That's the main point of single stream recycling -- it's easier, so people do it more. Also, pick-up is cheaper. Philadelphia is also making it easier on residents by allowing them to just label other bags "Recycling" -- either with a special sticker or their own sign.

It's a sign of the times: rustling through the trash for recyclable goods to redeem for a few cents is no longer the vocation of the downtrodden. It's gone mainstream.

The USA Today reports that a truck full of recyclables can be worth as much as $1,000, with newspapers worth $600. It's an organized industry featuring fleets of trucks and cell phones looking to take advantage of rising commodity prices. Much of the paper makes its way over to China where it's less plentiful. Some cities have laws against stealing recyclables because they rely on the revenue to fund the collections.

But here's what I wonder about, from an economic standpoint: if collecting recyclables is so profitable in thickly-settled areas, why bother with a city-sponsored effort at all? Wouldn't it make more sense to let enterprising individuals collect and sell the "merchandise" on their own, rather than putting a bunch of people on the town's payroll, and then using the police to enforce the monopoly? Certain services need to be handled publicly -- police, fire, etc. -- but does recycling really fit the bill? It makes sense when it's a public good in need of subsidy but when old newspapers can be sold for big profits, maybe we should just let the market work.

In case you haven't heard, it won't be too long before everybody in the country will be switching over to compact fluorescent lights, or CFLs. Although the twisty little lights are more expensive than ordinary lightbulbs, they use about a quarter of the electricity and last ten times as long. Unfortunately, they also contain mercury, which means that they can't be thrown away with the regular garbage, as they will pollute the groundwater around landfills. This problem threw a major monkey wrench into the U.S. government's plan to phase out incandescent light bulbs over the next six years. After all, if the U.S. doesn't have an infrastructure for dealing with blown or broken fluorescents, then it can't really make them the sole form of legal lightbulb, can it?

Enter Home Depot.

Home Depot, the second-largest retailer in the United States, announced yesterday that it would begin accepting used CFLs in all of its 1,973 stores. While other stores have previously offered bulb recycling on special days, this program will be available at all times. It will be the largest CFL recycling program in the country. What's more, given that 75% of the U.S. population lives within ten miles of a Home Depot, this program will also be relatively convenient.

I've always liked the way that CFLs save money; now I love the way that Home Depot's saving the groundwater!

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. He usually doesn't get this excited about a retailer, but until the government picks up the slack, it's nice to have Home Depot!

More green tech stories:

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Late on rent? Loan shark breathing down your neck? Can't fill your car with gas to get to work on Monday? Assuming all available funds and traditional sources of credit are tapped out, here are 25 (legal) ways to raise cash in a few days. We list them in order from least to most desperate.

So you need to scrounge up enough dinero to fill up your gas tank for your summer road trip to the beach but you sucked the couch dry of change just getting to work last week. What are you going to do?

Well, one way you can get some quick cash is to sell scrap metal to your local salvage yard or recycling center. My co-worker bought a used camper for just over $600 and took his old one to get scrapped. He was surprised to find out the scrap value of his camper almost paid for his new camper purchase!

While this method isn't something you'll likely be able to survive upon for extended periods, legally anyway, I'm sure you can find something to get melted down. Now is the time to do it as metal prices are getting high enough to spark thefts of copper from homes and catalytic converters from cars.

We want to focus on the legal ways to get some money from scrap metal so first we need to find some. If you are remodeling or have unused copper pipes in your house it may be worth pulling them out and heading to the salvage yard. If pipes are out of reach, check out your garage, basement or shed, where I am guessing you can find something to salvage. This endeavor may be especially profitable if you have been something of a packrat in this metal treasure trove of yours.

Once or twice a year, I try to purge my closet of all of the clothes that either don't fit, are hopelessly outdated, stained or otherwise just been hanging around for too long. The items I can't seem to part with are those that I paid a lot of money for or the clothes that I never wore -- and they still have the tags to prove it. Usually, I donate these clothes to Goodwill, even though it pains me to throw such smart, stylish clothes in a garbage bag and dump them in a parking lot.

Anyway, a new company called Revolve Couture may help me not only get rid of some of my lightly used or new clothes, and I could make a few bucks doing it. Revolve Couture is an online consignment boutique specializing in designer wares. Consignors mail clothing, shoes and accessories to the company, and they sell them on ebay, charging a flat 33% commission (they'll pick up the clothes if you live within 10 miles of Greenwich, CT, where the company is based). If items are not sold, they are either mailed back to the owner at the consignor's expense or donated to Shop for a Cure.

Do you still subscribe to your local newspaper? If you do, you likely have a stack of papers somewhere in the house or garage waiting to be recycled. Apartment Therapy has come up with 20 ways to recycle or reuse newspaper around your house. It turns out leftover newsprint is suited for a myriad of uses but it is especially useful for soaking up odors in many places.

If you have a smelly container, fridge or shoe stuffing some newspaper in it is likely to pull the odor and moisture out. This method of odor fighting is no doubt much cheaper than air sprays and baking soda. Other uses include keeping weeds out of your garden and as an additive to your compost pile. The uses for newspaper around your house or community abound. You can even use the newspaper to prevent icing on your car windows during the winter.

We don't get the paper at home anymore, since the idea of on time delivery eluded the local delivery boy. At work we get 3-4 papers daily which get recycled by an employee but I don't think any of the papers enjoy any of the varied recycling activities mentioned by Apartment Therapy. I enjoy using newspaper and Windex to clean my car windows as it does a great job of preventing streaking, but that is my extent of paper reuse.

Do you still get a hard copy paper? If so, what do you re-use your newspaper for?

For some reason, I've always taken a kind of ironic comfort in the famous quotation "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." Although I recently learned that it's a paraphrase of a famous quote from Herodotus, I always thought that it came from Shakespeare, and I used to imagine a dedicated Elizabethan mailman, clad in breeches, stiff collar, and cloak, riding a horse in a rainstorm to get the mail through.

This, of course, stood in opposition to my mailman in Virginia, who wouldn't bother to drop off the mail if there was snow near my mailbox or if it was too muddy outside. When I moved to New York, mail service got even worse; my mail carrier canceled many of my magazines because he didn't like carting them around. In fact, I had to get a post office box just to ensure that I received my most important mail.

Electronic trash is both dangerous for our nation's landfills and wasteful. Fortunately, help in recycling these goods is coming from an unlikely source; the U.S. Post Office. The quasi-government organization has announced it is testing a free mail-back program which will allow anyone to mail broken/used up small electronics and inkjet cartridges to a recycler, free of charge.

The beta phase of the program will begin in 10 areas of the country, with plans to take it countrywide if successful. Free envelopes, available at the post office, are supplied by Clover Technologies Group, who also pays the postage and receives the trash. To fulfill its 'zero to landfill' policy, the company will refurbish or recycle all the old phones, MP3 players, printers and other e-crap that has reached the end of its usefulness.

The announcement doesn't stipulate the parameters of 'small electronics', probably a mistake. I can already envision one of my neighbors stopping by the local post office lobby after closing to drop off a large-screen television, an envelope taped to its cracked screen. Nonetheless, this seems like an excellent use of the postal service.

- Thanks to Engadget

Crocs will be making their way to feet everywhere, thanks to a new SolesUnited campaign to collect old shoes for recycling. The program was announced last night on "The Celebrity Apprentice," and it asks people to donate their worn-out Crocs so they can be remade into recycled Crocs that will be donated around the world.

These shoes made of recycled products are going to countries in which many people do not currently have any shoes. Crocs is outfitting them to help them avoid injuries to their feet and help them walk more. In January alone, 90,000 pairs of shoes were sent to developing countries around the world. These shoes are embossed with a special logo to indicate that they are made of recycled plastic and are intended for charity (not to be sold).

I don't care what anyone says about the comfort of Crocs, I will never, ever wear a pair. I may not be a fashion queen, but even I won't wear anything that ugly. But I get it... the shoes are popular with many and the company has done well on Wall Street. Kudos to Crocs for expanding this program to get more shoes on the feet of those who need them. This is a great program!

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

You pay to heat water for your shower, yet up to 90% of that heat (heat equals energy) ends up going down the drain along with some of your precious, precious hair. According to an article in Business Week, the heat we squander in wastewater equates to $40 billion a year (even more in households with several teenagers).

Among the companies that pose a solution to this loss is RenewAbility. Its Power-Pipe product cleverly captures heat from the gray water and uses it to preheat water entering your home from your water supplier.

The company claims that its product can be installed for $600-$1200, and will yield a return on investment of 15-50%, four times the cost efficiency of solar power. While I'm always uneasy with figures that posit such a quick payoff, the idea of reclaiming the heat I've paid for makes a lot of sense to me. If you're looking for ways to shave your energy usage, this or a similar product might be worth a look.