Earth Day 2013: 5 gadgets that help make going green easy

2. iSolar Backup Battery Charger

Triple C Designs
The iSolar Backup Battery Charger is part of Tripple C Designs' lineup for this summer.

The iSolar Backup Battery Charger lets people charge their mobile devices, not to mention acting as an extra power source for those constantly on the go.

A three-hour charge under the sun powers the pocket-size bamboo charger enough to boost your device’s power by 40 percent (a six-hour charge in direct sunlight can fully charge most portable devices, according to the company). It also offers a USB adapter to charge the backup with battery power on rainy days.

The iSolar Backup Battery Charger is part of the green collection by Triple C Designs.

“There are plenty of times that your battery is dead,” says Mercedes Smith, the account manager for Triple C Designs in New York. “The beauty of it is that you can stay charged via solar light.”

A backup charger may have more appeal out of convenience than out of environmental consciousness, but it makes a difference in the long run. Instead of running to a café or public area with an outlet in those critical moments when a mobile device coincidentally dies, people can take advantage of this easy-to-use power source.  

The charger works for phones, e-readers, tablets, and digital cameras, among other devices. 

It is available on Uncommon Goods and Photojojo and will soon be available in Nordstrom.

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.