GreenYour.com

A battery charger or power adapter converts the high voltage electricity from a wall outlet to the low voltage power used to recharge the batteries in devices like cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, digital cameras, laptops, and camcorders. But often, these power-producers are very inefficient, turning nearly 95 percent of the energy they draw into heat instead of power for your electronic device.

Find it! Helpful tools for cutting phantom loads from cell phones

If you touch the charger and it's warm, then it's still drawing energy. That means you're wasting money and sending untold pounds of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Want to ensure the phantom drain ceases? Well, if you tend to forget to unplug your charger when your device is fully juiced, there are a number of simple things you can do: buy an ENERGY STAR charger, a solar charger, or a device that includes audio alerts that remind you to unplug the charger when your battery is full.

Unplugging your charger helps you go green because ...

• Your cell phone charger wastes 95 percent of the power it consumes. If just 10 percent of the world's cell phone users unplugged their charger when their phone is fully charged, we would save enough energy to power 60,000 European homes per year.[1]

Portable electronics are rapidly replacing those that run solely off an AC wall outlet: cell phones are replacing landlines, more than 20 percent of all computer sales are laptops, digital cameras are pushing out film-based cameras, and PDAs are winning out over paper organizers.[2] A typical US household uses between five to 10 adapters, and each year, more than one billion new adapters are shipped worldwide.[3]

Only five percent of the power consumed by a charger is used to juice up a cell phone, smartphone, or PDA.[4] Even while charging, 10 to 16 times more energy is often drawn from the outlet than can be retrieved by the batteries, which means the efficiency for many cell phones is as low as six to 20 percent.[2] The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that if every phone sold in the US in 2007 used ENERGY STAR qualified chargers, which are 40 percent more efficient than standard chargers, the energy saved would prevent over one million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the equivalent emissions of more than 200,000 cars, and could light 760,000 homes per year.[5][6] Additional national annual savings include 4.5 billion kWh of electricity use, three million tons of carbon dioxide from power plant emissions, and $380 million dollars on the end users' electricity bill.[2]

External links

• BRDA Parasite Charger: Innovative, design-forward charger designed by Swedish design team BRDA is not currently available for purchase.
• ENERGY STAR
• Federal Electronics Challenge