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Being 'Green' Starts With Responsible Recycling of Old Electronics at Green Citizen

I've been feeling increasingly frustrated that I am not doing at least my fair share to promote 'eco-responsibility' in our every day lives.  Running around the house turning out lights and berating my family members about how we need to start doing the laundry at 3 AM isn't making me feel like I'm sufficiently contributing to stewardship of our environment.

The most obvious area where we can make a difference away from reducing our energy consumption is to reduce our garbage production. The amount of garbage that human beings produce every day is astounding-- I now feel like a criminal when I buy something at a store that is 'too packaged'.  All I see are wasted resources that go into unnecessary "look and feel" outer layers that are irrelevant to the functionality of the product that I just bought.  I now routinely refuse bags when I go shopping unless they are absolutely necessary, and I've begun bringing my own re-usable bag into stores.

Getting back to garbage, let's talk about how we must change the way that we get rid of old electronics and batteries.  DO NOT throw these obsolete devices (computers, display screens, televisions, VCR players, old DVD players, phones of all kinds) away; DO NOT think that calling your normal garbage disposal company for a special pick-up of electronics means they are being recycled responsibly.

Fortunately, I recently discovered GreenCitizen, which recycles electronics and batteries responsibly.  From the GreenCitizen website:

TOTAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Today the electronics de-manufacturing and recycling industry lacks standards and accountability. At GreenCitizen, recycled items are tracked through the entire de-manufacturing process to provide full accountability for the safe disposal of all toxins. With our accountability system, manufacturers, retailers, environmentalists and government are able to measure the success of their investments and efforts to support electronics recycling.

RESPONSIBLE RECYCLING /SAFE DISPOSAL

At GreenCitizen, 100% of what you give us is truly recycled. Components that can be recycled are, and toxic elements are disposed of safely. By reusing glass, plastic, aluminum and heavy metals (like lead, copper and mercury), recycling averts the energy use and pollution linked with mining and drilling for new materials.

Green Citizen, which was started by James Kao, formerly of Oracle, is doing something important.  Please support them, as I do, by letting them recycle your old electronics.  The price that you pay them to do this is insignificant compared to the good that they are doing-- they have drop off centers in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, and they will pick up at your office.

Blaise Pascal On Man's Ability to do Evil in the Name of Faith

'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction'.

Blaise Pascal
French mathematician, physicist (1623 - 1662)

My namesake is also known for Pascal's wager, a pragmatic or decision theory-based approach to faith-- resolving that it is better to have faith in God because if you don't and God does, indeed, exist, you would have considerable downside in being wrong.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Pascal's Wager” is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God. The name is somewhat misleading, for in a single paragraph of his Pensées, Pascal apparently presents at least three such arguments, each of which might be called a ‘wager’ — it is only the final of these that is traditionally referred to as "Pascal's Wager". We find in it the extraordinary confluence of several important strands of thought: the justification of theism; probability theory and decision theory, used here for almost the first time in history; pragmatism; voluntarism (the thesis that belief is a matter of the will); and the use of the concept of infinity.