Earth Day - How to Save the Planet with USB Gadgets?

In celebration of Earth Day, we thought we'd revisit a few of the items that take a bit of the load off of Mother Earth. We have organized the ten eco gadgets into three sections: Saving Power, Buying Eco-friendly Peripherals, and Generating Your Own Power. Please take some time today to see what you can do to help as well.

Saving Power
This first set of devices interface with your computer to let you click and control your PCs power consumption. The Checktap power strip monitors and reports your current power draw from all of your connected peripherals allowing you to shut off or power down your devices.

The Tricklestar also controls connected power, but it is more interested in off times as opposed to run times. Tricklestar senses when your PC has been shut down and kills power to all your peripherals. As soon as you start up your PC Tricklestar re-enables all your sockets and things run just as they should.

To round out the offerings the Eco-button allows you quickly send your PC into power save mode. The green and yellow drink coaster-sized button should help to remind you to use it each time you step away from your computer. Shutting it down would be better but sometimes the demands of a busy day just can't tolerate the time to start up and shut down but there's not much excuse not to use this or any of the other footprint reducing tools here.

Buying Eco-friendly Peripherals
Here are a few items that have been specially constructed to reduce their impact on the environment by recycling, reducing or removing the materials or byproducts of the manufacturing process.

The ATP Earthdrive is made with recycled material and itself is recyclable. ATP also donates a portion of the profits to tree planting programs.

The Simpletech redrive and this random keyboard both have opted to substitute plastic parts for wooden ones. Wood products bio-degrade eventually and effectively take up less room in landfills whereas plastic parts which last forever(in a bad way). A new big killer in landfills that's getting a lot of attention is cell phone charging accessories.

Shiro is setting a trend which hopefully cell phone manufacturers will parrot, they have a solar charging PMP. It takes about 6 hours to charge but almost completely removes the need for any charging equipment.

Generating Power on Your Own
Alternate energy sources are another way of reducing your footprint. The sun and motion can be be converted energy to power devices reducing your need to plug-in but still keep you plugged in.

The nPower Peg can convert kinetic energy from shaking the inductive charger into juice for your gizmos. Just by walking with the device in tow, in a backpack or slung to your hip jedi-style, can produce about about half the over juice that's found in a normal USB socket. It may take twice as long to get a full charge out of it for your hungriest gadgets but it will eventually get there.

Solar panels are showing up in the oddest of places now and becoming cheap enough to place in just about everything. Case in point: the solar bikini. The tiny bikini has just enough panels to funnel sun-power into any device that's normally happy with USB current.