Greetings TakePart faithful! We’ve got some exciting news - TakePart is now optimized for your iPhone. Anytime, anywhere you can bust out your sleek iPhone 3G and learn all about ways you can TakePart to make the world a better place.

Speaking of, are you thinking of ditching your old cellphone for an Apple iPhone? Before you take the plunge to AT&T, buy a ton of iPhone apps, and upgrade to iPhone 1.1.4 takepart and donate your old phone to for recycling. It’s the green way to get dispose of your phone and all proceeds go to charity.

A crew for the CBS investigative journalism program 60 Minutes was roughed up at a Chinese electronic waste site. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his crew were in the Middle Kingdom to trace the illegal black market electronic waste in the world’s most populous country. Upon entering a facility in Guiyu, on the south coast of China, the crew was attacked by a gang of workers who attempted to take their cameras. The crew managed to escape and brought back footage of the incident to air on CBS this week.

The workers at the facility had reason to want to take the cameras as their activities are highly illegal even in the loosely regulated world of Chinese industry. Improper dismantling of e-waste for the black market, as was being done in Guiyu, produces some of the most harmful pollutants known to man. The City of Guiyu is afflicted with some of the highest levels of cancer causing agents on Earth while pregnancies there are 6 times more likely than normal to result in miscarriage and 7 out of 10 children have too much lead in their blood.

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While I enjoyed watching the guys from Mythbusters find ways to improve fuel efficiency yesterday, it seems they left out the promising potential of a car that runs almost entirely on compressed air.  Zero Pollution Motors is preparing to launch 8,000 Compressed Air Vehicles (CAVs) by 2011, which will be sold directly from factories in the United States. (Hopefully they can get someone to fix up their website sooner!)

Check out this video report from CNN:

(Excuse me, Mr. Beck: “No man would drive a smart car”?! I’ll assume that comes from a place of insecurity.)

This is where we need to be heading to remove ourselves from

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Japanese Electronics Giants Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba announced plans to participate in a massive electronics program last week. The corporations will be joining forces with Manufacturers Recycling Management LLC in creating a national recycling infrastructure for their products via a 50 state rollout of recycling centers by January of 2009. The first phase of the program will start of this month in California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin expanding to the rest of the nation throughout next year.

This is a very important program to eliminate the industrial waste of components within our electronic items. Landfills and conventional recycling programs across the country simply do not have the resources of know how to properly handle the complicated components in our laptops, stereos, televisions and boom boxes. Worse yet, many programs which advertise that they will in fact “recycle” these items, actually ship them to impoverished countries for disadvantaged people to try and salvage small amounts of gold and other substances out of them by hand, an unsafe practice which is causing a human health crisis around the world.

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“Cap and trade” emissions programs have always struck a dubious note for me, and yesterday’s “Cashing in on Carbon” conference in London further reinforced my suspicions.   I’m all for polluters limiting their greenhouse gas output, and I have always argued that major environmental improvements for industries will come from economic incentives, but carbon trading seems like the old bait-and-switch deception long practiced by industry hucksters.   Sure they have to limit their emissions to a degree, but then they can buy up carbon credits all over they place, appearing to their shareholders and the public as environmental stewards, when in fact, they are continuing to spew huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.   And now we have industry leaders huddled in dark rooms scheming to make the most money from this shell game.

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I didn’t know that this was actually possible, but conservation groups have failed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to force the agency to clean up the pollution that is spilling into America’s “national parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges,” according to the Associated Press (via The Seattle Times).   From the article:

Earthjustice attorney Jennifer Chavez says the EPA has not met deadlines set by the Clean Air Act to get a plan from every state for cleaning up the haze that plagues places like Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Great Smoky Mountains national parks.

Now, I know that the EPA is tasked with regulating air quality, but I’m not sure the law is going to hold that they’re literally responsible for air quality.   I don’t know if groups can actually sue the EPA about this.   So I asked a lawyer.

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Ben & Jerry’s and Greenpeace have teamed up to bring America its first Cleaner, Greener Freezer. Refrigerators and freezers have an enormous impact on Global Warming through their use of harmful Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and other harmful gases, known collectively as F-gases. Cumulatively, F-Gases account for nearly one fifth of the global warming pollution spewed into our atmosphere. Worse yet, HFCs pollution has much more staying power in the atmosphere than Carbon Dioxide (CO2), causing nearly 1400 times the damage CO2 does when measured over 100 years periods.

Greenpeace has long promoted hydrocarbon as a natural, environmentally friendly substance to replace HFCs as the cooling element in refrigeration units. The organization has made great headway with hydrocarbon in both the European and Asian markets and is now spearheading the use of the new technology in the United States in partnership with those environmentally conscious ice cream merchants, Ben & Jerry’s. The freezers are currently in test use in Ben & Jerry’s retail ice cream shops in the Washington DC, Vermont and Boston areas, while the company seeks EPA approval to spread the technology far & wide. Once EPA approval is attained Ben & Jerry’s will share the technology with the ultimate goal of making Hydrocarbon freezer and refrigeration units the standard in the United States.

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Following up on Gina’s post about David Letterman’s rant on global warming, I thought we might like to take a closer look at Letterman’s guest, Thomas Friedman, and his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.   Friedman appeared on the sadly Russert-less Meet the Press this weekend and talked to Tom Brokaw about the problem of climate change and the necessity that “energy technology” becomes the next Industrial Revolution.

Friedman is convinced that America needs “a hundred thousand people experimenting in a hundred thousand garages working coming up with a hundred thousand ideas” so we can lead the way in this new era of energy technology.   He states that though he “is not against drilling,” he feels that instead of saying, “Drill baby drill,” we need to be yelling “invent invent invent!”

Friedman has a lot of interesting things to say involving the global evolution of industry - he even says that China should take its time and be as dirty as it wants as it build its industry.

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Just in case your day was going relatively well, allow me to come to your parade, and rain on it. H. Barry Dellinger, a chemist from LSU Baton Rouge, has gone out and discovered a brand new pollutant, in the air right now! And not only that, we know that these pollutants are “formed in combustion ranging from cigarettes to power plants and diesel engines”! High fives all around!

The Philadelphia Inquirer has the scoop on this fun new discovery, and tells us this:

Whether they [the pollutants] are harmful to human health is unknown, although the chemist [Dellinger] who discovered the particles said their existence might help explain why some nonsmokers get lung cancers and other diseases often associated with tobacco use.

Oh, and also, in case you were worried that this is another one of those flash-in-the-pan, fad pollutants (like the South Beach Diet), Dr. Dellinger assures us that these babies can last for “hours, days and in some cases indefinitely.”

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Today in Wikincubate, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of ways to get engaged with socially conscious issues:

Police brutality

Racism

Racism multimedia, including this Dave Chappelle classic:

Pollution

Organic food