A great way to keep our Earth clean is to recycle or even donate your technology. This can include CDs, cell phones, computers, inkjet cartridges, batteries, and more. By recycling or donating your electronics you can prevent lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic materials that are present in electronics to leak from landfills and then go into the ground and water. This can cause health and environmental hazards. According to the EPA, in 2010, 1,790,000 tons or 310,000,000 units were trashed and put into our landfills. There are a couple of ways to prevent this and here are some ways:

1) Find a recycler in your area.
Check out Earth911 and on the left hand side, type what material you want to recycle and your zip code. When you search that item, a list of recycling companies with the material you want to recycle will come up. Additionally, you can do a quick search, and you can select even more items you want to recycle based on different categories.

 2) Donate your electronics.
If your product can be reused think about donating it to a reputable reuse organization. Make sure the product is still fully functional and include any manuals, monitors, keyboards, connection cables, software, etc. Some great places to donate would be World Computer Exchange, Reconnect, StRut, Komputers 4 Kids, eBay Giving Works, and much more.

Before you donate or recycle your electronics make sure you clean it by clearing any data or clearing out the hard drive. Try KillDisk to destroy all data on hard disks, USB drives and floppy disks. Here is a link for cleaning out your Mac http://www.wikihow.com/Wipe-a-Mac-Clean.

By recycling or donating your electronic devices you are making a positive impact on the environment. Share these tips and make the Earth a cleaner place.