By Don Albinger, VP of Renewable Energy, Johnson Controls
How many dead cell phones are you still the proud owner of? I know I’ve got at least three. Guess how many there are in America right now. About 500 million. That’s a half-billion lying around in desk drawers and utility room cabinets in our homes and offices. Think they’re worthless? Not hardly. Actually, they represent a gold mine.
Those cell phones contain an estimated 17 million pounds of copper, 374,000 pounds of silver and 38,000 pounds of gold. You’d have to mine two tons of earth to get a half ounce of gold – so think how much dirt you’d need to move to produce 38,000 pounds. And now think about how much energy we could save in mining, transporting and refining precious metals if we just recycled a bunch of useless cell phones.
Imagine that you are holding a handful of coal in your hand that contains 100 units of energy. If you burn that coal to generate electricity and then push that electricity through transmission lines to your building, you can use it to run electric motors that pump hot water throughout your facility to keep it warm.
Out of that handful of coal you started with, how many units of energy do you think actually end up in your building as heat? The answer is not much: only 10 out of the original 100 units of energy. The rest – 90% – is lost along the way.
That’s a lot of lost energy, right? But think about it this way: what if we reverse the process? Instead of thinking about how much energy we’re losing, what if we think about how much energy we could be saving? If you save ten units of energy by making your building more energy efficient, you avoid burning ten times the amount of coal that would have been necessary to generate that electricity. Save a little energy just by turning off the lights in your conference rooms and running your building more efficiently, and you save ten times as much on the generation of that electricity. Little things can make a big impact.
You know those power strips underneath your desk that the power supplies to your computer, monitor, printer and other electronics are all plugged into? Did you know that they continue burning electricity even when the devices are turned off? Each power strip uses from 20 to 40 watts of electricity – let’s call it 30 watts on average. If just a million people started turning off those power strips before they leave the office, electric companies could avoid burning 1,255 rail cars of coal.
If you have two of those converter boxes for your cable television in your house – you know, the ones that are always on – they’re consuming about as much electricity as your refrigerator. That’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While you’re sleeping. While you’re at work. While you’re on vacation. If one million people unplugged their cables boxes for eight hours while they’re in bed, we’d save 87.6 million kilowatt hours of electricity.
On Earth Day last week, I was privileged to be one of the speakers at a conference on Wisconsin’s energy future. A bevy of distinguished representatives from government agencies, universities and private industry spoke about topics that included federal and state energy policies, renewable energy resources, green jobs, transportation issues and climate change.
It was a reminder that we’re grappling with big issues requiring big ideas and big investments of resources. But it’s also good to remember that some of the solutions can be pretty simple.
Efficiency now. It’s never been more important.
It would be helpful for home curbside recycling programs to be updated as we have done in the work place. Note; curbside recycling should include batteries, fluorescent light bulbs, cell phones, and all else. Milwaukee County does have a drop off site for hazardous cleaners and materials but curbside would be much better. Otherwise these materials are probably on the curbside anyway, only it the trash. Even simple curbside recycling of plastic and glass is a challenge, although it has improved. It would also be helpful it the data you quoted was in a table showing action and saved energy. I taught environmental science for a year and even college students need help connecting the dots when it comes to recycling. Recycling, today, is a lot of work and time consuming. Consumers need to be paid to recycle.