 Welcome to TechSoup 30s, our weekly 30 minute mini webinar. We're really excited to bring you the topic today. Jim Lynch is going to be talking, Jim Lynch from TechSoup is going to be talking all about green tech, really talking about the evolution of green tech at TechSoup and also things you can do to ensure that you've got green tech technology and also be able to communicate remotely. Jim's got some great tips for everyone. I want to remind everyone on this webinar right now, on the lower right hand corner of your window, there is a settings button. It looks like a gear. If you click on that, there is a quality selection. And when you click on that, you can choose auto or you can go all the way up to 720 HD. So what we recommend is if the screen becomes fuzzy, you can refresh your screen or you can also change the quality. Another quick reminder is that we do record each of these events and we post them in the TechSoup 30 course and they're by date. So you can always go back to any of our previous events and review any of the webinars along with any of the resources that our presenters have shared. So we also want your feedback. There is a survey. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to know what you think of the content and also what other types of content you would like to have shared with you over the course of the next few months. So I am getting ready to turn this over to Jim and I will be chatting out to everyone a series of links that Jim has queued up for everyone. So Jim, thank you for joining us today and take it away. Hi, everybody. Hope you can see me. I'm Jim Lynch. I'm our senior writer for our blogs and our articles and our newsletters and all that stuff. In addition to that, for many years, for many, many years, I've been our environmentalist at TechSoup and I've created all of our environmental programs from the late 90s, really. So I'm going to screen share here and show you what I have prepared. So I'm hoping this comes on your screen, just like it has mine. And so there we go. There's the front piece of this presentation. So I'm moving on to slide two. So TechSoup has had a pretty long range interest in green technology and environmental things and the whole thing started when people wanted, they got ahold of us, they would call us and they say they wanted free or cheap computers. And that kind of kicked off the whole thing for us at TechSoup. Since then, we have been working in fairly significant ways to develop electronics recycling and especially the part of it, what they call the high end or the high value part of it called reuse or refurbishment or factory remanufacturing. We do have a mission in that area of diverting lots of electronics of all types away from landfills by recycling them. And we have an special interest in reclaiming lots and lots of good fairly recent, what we call use, but useful computers and other things like tablets for use by anybody who needs them on the digital divide. And that includes lots of nonprofits and lots of churches and even libraries actually need very low cost equipment for their public access computing. And my personal passion is to recycle everything possible wherever, whenever I can. And so I want to share with you some of the stuff I've learned over the years on how to do that. And then I love to talk about office greening, which is actually fairly simple and not very expensive. And in the long run, it saves quite a bit of money for any office or organization. So that's an overview. So as I mentioned, we started in around the late 90s because people just wanted free or very low cost computers. So we started sending out a fact sheet. And that was actually my work to send out this fact sheet of recyclers. And the reason why this was being faxed was that most of the people that called us did not have email at that point. So we have this one pager thing. And we were at that point only in Northern California. And since then, we have posted online recycling listings in the United States and then refurbisher listings worldwide. We don't do that work anymore. But I'm going to give you links to places that have that information where you can find a recycler or refurbisher wherever you are. And then a little bit later, after about five years, we got to work on a project in cooperation with Microsoft to distribute low cost windows licensing to nonprofit refurbishers. That was a big deal back in those years because one of the problems we found in the world was that most used computers had pirated software on them, pirated windows especially, because the cost of windows was pretty high. And so this was an incredible boon for that industry to be able to allow them to come out of the shadows and distribute fully legal equipment with authentic windows on it that would update and would protect people from viruses even back in those years. In the same time, I published a report on the industry with recommendations on how it should be improved. About that same period of time, we started a national conference for the refurbishment field, electronics refurbishment field, which is still going to this day. I'm glad to say I don't have to run that anymore, which is probably best for everyone. We, in 2005, started our own online store called the Refurbished Computer Initiative. That's been super successful. It's one of the most popular things we have on TechSoup is to supply around half price factory refurbished equipment with really good warranties and solid performing equipment that lasts for a long time. 76,000 of them to date, so I'll show you the stats on why that's an environmental thing. More recently, I've testified in front of Congress and the US Trade Commission and to the big trade association around recycling, which is called ISRI, on the state of electronics refurbishment. So we're what they call subject matter experts in this field still and are invited both domestically and internationally to talk to people about what's going on. So I say similar stuff as I'm saying now to audiences around the world on this stuff. So what's going on? Electronics recycling is, to me, pretty darn interesting because it's sort of the cutting edge of all kinds of recycling. It's, for one thing, it's the fastest growing part of the solid way stream. Most of electronic devices are thrown away and they're not recycled around the world. The aggregate percentage across all countries is around 10% of computers and cell phones and every other kind of electronics thing are recycled, 90% are not. The United States is doing OK, not great. We don't have a national recycling law on this, although every single session of Congress has proposed one. But so far, the Congress has not acted to create a national system for recycling electronics devices. So we're at about 27%, maybe a little bit over that right now. Cell phones are the least recycled electronic device in the United States and also worldwide. Computers like desktop computers and laptops are the most recycled things. We're up at around 40% in the United States on those. By comparison, there are several of the countries that are much better than us. They include top of the heap, which is Taiwan and South Korea, believe it or not, and also Japan. Those guys are up around 75% or 80% recycling. Also, all of Europe, the entire 27 states of the European Union are way, way ahead of us, up around 60% or 70% recycling rates on electronics. We're doing OK in the United States, despite some drawbacks. We have a long way to go. I cite the statistic of 400,000 mobile devices each day that are thrown out. That's a huge problem because it's an enormous waste, but also these things have toxic materials in them, like lots of toxic materials, mostly metals. And so that's why it's a super important thing to recycle them. And moreover, most devices that are going into our houses and offices going forward are going to have circuit boards in them. So they will be regarded as electronics devices. This is an area of development called IoT, the internet of things in which every kind of device, including refrigerators and your door lock and everything else will have a circuit board and will be connected to the internet and will be like a little computer. There are many, many computers in every single car now that's produced around the world. We're interested and refurbished for a lot of reasons, mostly to be able to supply lots of good-used equipment to charities and low-income families even. It's much, much more valuable in terms of just money to get a working PC out of, to reclaim a working PC than to scrap it out, shred it, and recover the metals, mostly, out of each of these devices. All right, so I want to get really specific here and say a bit about the cool things that I've come across. Recycling is not the same anywhere, everywhere in the United States. The big cities probably have better recycling services, curbside recycling services and pickups and more convenient places for recycling to happen than rural places that's pretty universal. Most, the basic things are glass, metals, plastics, and paper. Metals are the valuable part of recycling. Plastics are the least valuable part of the recycling stream. They're harder to recycle and there are many, there are just thousands of different kinds of them. I found that wherever I am, the most challenging thing to recycle are batteries, fluorescent lights, and compostables. And that includes stuff out of your kitchen, whether it's at home or at work. That's sort of the last challenge. There are a few cities like Austin, Texas that have zero waste objectives. That means nothing goes in the landfill and they're actually moving toward that and food scraps and yard waste and things like that. What we call compostables are the most difficult things to recycle. I love this place called earth911.com. That's, I've provided a link here for a place where you can search by zip code on pretty much anything. One of the things that are terribly difficult to recycle are mattresses and overstuffed furniture. It's almost impossible to get rid of that thing, that those sorts of things anywhere. So if you find something I'd love to know on where to responsibly recycle those kinds of things, there are two listings for electronics recycling. They are kind of competing, what would I call, certification programs that have hundreds of recyclers that are listed. The OCP regards them as both equally good. So easterwards.org is a nonprofit-based one. In fact, they're both nonprofit-based ones. And sustainable electronics is the other one. Those are good places to look. The Dell ReConnect program, I love because that's a cooperation between the big computer maker Dell and Goodwill. And it turns out that every single person in the country is 15 miles or less than a Goodwill from a Goodwill place. And most Goodwill's across the country now will take your any kind of electronics, anything with a circuit board or a plug or a battery. They'll take it at no cost and they'll put it into the Dell recycling stream, which is quite reputable. And here's a link to one of the most recent things I did for last year's Earth Day on how I recycle everything in our office. And there's a picture of me with a little compact fluorescent, little ice cream cone-shaped thing. Those are hard of hard to get rid of, but they have mercury in them. So it's important to recycle them properly. All right. So here's a lot of things that green tech is regarded as. And so you can see down this little list. Many things are kind of surprising like cloud computing. That's a thing where instead of having software on your computer, the software is actually online. So a good example of that is Gmail. If you're using Gmail, using a cloud computing service. So that's regarded as a green thing because it decreases the amount of infrastructure needed in offices, in every single little office and centralizes it in big huge data storage places that the big cloud companies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon host and have. They call those big huge things data centers. It's actually more energy efficient for the world. There's actually very vigorous competition among those big companies to have sustainable technology involved in that. That means they use renewable energy wherever possible. That means that they try to get their efficiency rates way, way, way up on those things using a new technology called virtualization that combines lots of servers into a single box for instance. But one of the things that most offices can do pretty readily is to reduce paper and you do that by duplexing. That means making your printer print on both sides using PDFs which require no paper at all in most cases. We have great products or product donations on TechSoup around this, which I think is on another slide on this. You can use energy efficient lighting. Fluorescence are better than incandescent lighting, much better in fact by a factor of maybe 10, reducing the amount of electricity that IT devices use. Using sleep settings on all your computers. So when you're not using it for 15 minutes, the thing kind of falls asleep. It doesn't take it off the network, it doesn't lose any of your documents or anything like that. It just puts it to sleep, doesn't affect anything. It brings the energy usage on any given electronic device by about 99%. So that's something that I hope everybody's doing is setting the sleep settings on your devices. All right. So we have a whole page on TechSoup devoted to green technology and that's mostly our refurbished computers that are on there and travel reduction types of things, collaboration tools, like the one we're using right now, which is Google Hangouts. There's our slide on the amount of impact we've had with our many thousands of refurbished computers that we've supplied to organizations. I think the funnest one I like is the, we've saved enough electricity to power Las Vegas for a whole summer, or most of a whole summer, including all the casinos. Very fun. So I wanted to get to telework, which is something that is a very energy efficient thing. And also really good for small offices. TechSoup is now fully getting going on having, allowing a lot of our workers to work often from home. That's what telework is. It has a really massive environmental benefits, which essentially reduces air pollution, mostly from going back and forth by car. A quarter of Americans now telecommute and a quarter more of them. That means half of all people in the US workforce are in some degree information workers and that makes it possible for them to do it. So there's a lot of room to grow in that. We have found one of the great benefits of telework is that people like it. People are pretty productive on it. They regard it as a great benefit to their work-life balance, to be able to work at home and set their hours. We haven't suffered any productivity from it that we can find at our own offices. We have offices in London and Warsaw as well as San Francisco. And our London office has basically become a virtual office. Almost nobody goes there. Almost everybody works from wherever they are and that's working out very well for us. What's important is that it doesn't take a lot. You know, it just needs, you just need a laptop, maybe a cell phone, some file sharing. You can actually, people, one thing we use at TechSoup and other offices use is something called VPN that stands for virtual private networking. And that means that you can have kind of a tunnel into your computer system or your office which is very secure from intrusion. Email is a requirement pretty much and I mentioned collaboration software. Skype or our product donation go to meeting is one of them. One thing I wanna say also about this is that it takes a really different management style to work with people who are working remotely. I provided a link here on a pretty good article that we've done which kind of lines out. It's actually a little more complicated and it's really different from conventional management. You don't know when somebody's at their desk working away. So you measure people, you know, long story short, the way we do it at TechSoup is we measure people on their assignments. You know, we make it very clear to them what their assignments are and what their deadlines are and we track that very carefully to make sure that they're on that. And as long as they get their work in, we're good. You know, where everybody can work wherever they want. And so we've got a telecommuting toolkit, which I like a lot and that's a more in-depth thing, more in-depth article that tells you everything you need to know and everything you need actually to get people working remotely. We found it very, very beneficial at our organization. So I think it's time for me to turn it over to Susan so let me go ahead and share that, take this thing off of my screen sharing and back to you Susan. All right, thanks. Great, that was a very interesting overview about just period, just green tech and also working remotely. For those of you that are joining us, I chatted out it for me in this, in my role now at TechSoup, I work remotely one or two days a week, but in my previous job, I worked remotely almost every day. I did travel from location to location, but primarily everything was remote. And I can tell you like Jim said, there are some specific skill sets and some best practices. And I was reviewing both the articles before today and they're both full of like actionable things that you can really take if you are in a workplace that is considering becoming a more remote friendly workplace, most of those articles can help you with that. I find myself I'm much less distracted Jim when I'm working at home with the exception of my dog, which Jim met just remotely a little while ago, but I find I can really focus and get work done without distractions from people walking over to me in the workplace. So it's really great to collaborate with people live, but it's also good if you've got deadlines or you have some things you have to get done when you work remotely, you generally aren't as distracted. So a quick couple of quick things before we sign off, next week, we will be hosting another 30 minute event. And that is gonna be tips to maximize your fundraising efforts with social media. And Molly Bacon, our social media manager will be joining us for like the top 10 tips or eight to 10 tips that you can use to maximize your fundraising efforts in your nonprofit with social media. And she will be coming back a little later in June to again talk about social media and some best practices in nonprofit communications. Then on June 13th, we have how to make an effective infographic with Adobe Creative Cloud. And if you're interested in coming to any of our full 60 minute events, we have one this Thursday, which will be on really, when do you know do you need an internal IT staffer or do you need to find a consultant? Do you need to keep people on staff or is it just someone you need ad hoc? We have someone joining us from Tech Impact, which is a nonprofit that helps folks manage their IT needs. And they'll be talking a little bit about that this Thursday. So you can join us by going to techsoup.org and going to our events page. And I will chat that out to everyone as well. I did wanna thank Jim. Jim put a lot of thought and effort into this presentation. I am going to upload this PowerPoint presentation to the website. So when you come back to this module, this week's module, you will be able to find that PowerPoint as a downloadable. So you can take that. And if you need to use it to influence anyone in your workplace to make it more green or if you're trying to argue for a more remote style workplace. So I will do that shortly after this event ends. So Jim, thank you for doing this and thanks for spearheading these efforts here at Techsoup. Everyone on this webinar should also know I was at an event with folks from all over the world. And there was someone that came over to Jim and said, look at the photos of, and you know, Jim was it in Sarajevo or Bulgaria. It was a country in Eastern Europe. And he was so excited because Jim gave him all the tips he needed to get it started there. So I hope you took away as much as I did from this presentation. So we wanna thank you. We hope to see you either this Thursday at our next webinar on IT staffing or next week at our next Techsoup 30. Thanks so much everybody. Thanks Jim.