During his pre­sen­ta­tion last week, Colin men­tioned his research into sus­tain­abil­ity and the cradle-to-cradle con­cept, specif­i­cally. I thought I’d share my recent expe­ri­ence with Green Phone, which I first heard about in this New York Times Magazine arti­cle in January. It’s an easy way to recy­cle old mobile devices -- and you get paid to do it. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to greenphone.com.
2. Tell them what model of phone you have, and set up an account.
3. They gen­er­ate a postage-paid mail­ing label for you. Print it out, and stick the label on a padded envelope.
4. Put your old phone and acces­sories in the enve­lope, and drop it off at the Post Office.
5. Wait a cou­ple weeks for them to receive and test your phone. If it’s in good work­ing con­di­tion, they’ll cut you a check! If not, well, they’ll recy­cle all the parts (includ­ing tox­ics, like mer­cury) and hey, no big loss on your part -- you didn’t even pay for postage!

I had an early RAZR and they cut me a check for $22. (It would’ve been $28, but the screen was dam­aged.) From my point of view, the best part is that they recy­cled all my use­less acces­sories, like the charger and ear­bud, which I could not have recy­cled myself locally.

Be sure to use my refer­ral code of 50957 to get a 10% bonus. (Just using the link above should work.)