Mercury Alert - Where to Recycle, How to Clean Up
By: Mellenie Runion

PLEASE Recycle Your CFLs!

One-half milligram of mercury per bulb, times millions, amounts to significant levels of mercury in our groundwater. Groundwater pollution is not something that you can avoid. You can not separate polluted groundwater if you live in a nice neigbhood or if you are too lazy to recycle. Not recycling CFLs, batteries, and other harmful items is having an impact on the world levels of cancer.

As an example, California banned CFLs from trash in 2006, but since that time local governments estimate that less than 10 percent of all CFLs receive proper disposal and recycling, reported KGO-TV in San Francisco.

Where should your used CFLs go? Home Depot, Ace Hardware, and Ikea all accept CFLs and batteries as a customer service. Check with your local city or town for local CFL recycling.

• Dispose of them in recycling facilities specially equipped to deal with CFLs
• When they break, you should open a window and make sure a vacuum is NOT used around the area for a while.
• Throw away bedding or clothing that has come into contact with the powder from the broken bulb

Learn more from the EPA

For those of you that need to be working around the clock - your work might be accessable from your hip. Forget the laptop, charger, spare battery, and case, now you can get work done from your iPhone with these top business applications.

• iTerminal
• Encamp
• FlightTrack Pro
• mbPointer
• Analytics App
• LinkedIn
• Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite
• ClockIn
• eBay Mobile
• Evernote

With over 65,000 applications, the iPhone is quickly becoming the business source for many working professionals on the go. You can access files from your company, edit the web site, and even edit your next presentation. The 3GS models are providing better security and improved real-time email delivery.

While this is not the phone for every member of your staff, it could be very useful for some. You should always evaluate what your business needs instead of what everyone wants.

I can only image showing the iPhone to my parents for the first time. My parents that still have a rotary home phone.

A smart meter could be coming to your home very soon. In Virginia, Dominion Power applied August 5, 2009 to the U.S. Department of Energy for a 200 million stimulus grant. If approved, the power company plans to install 2.4 million smart meters for customers, by 2012.

Supporting letters were sent to the Energy Secretary Steven Chu from Governor Tim Kaine and Virginia's congressional delegation accompanied the application.

"Dominion's voltage conservation technology is an important attribute of this grant proposal," Governor Kaine wrote. "Voltage conservation allows the utility to more precisely match the voltage going into each customer to the needs of the customer. This creates energy savings throughout the day and concomitant savings in carbon and other emissions."

Benefits of smart meters include:

An automatic off-peak energy usage reduction of about 4 percent
or more annually for typical residential customers through more 
efficient management of energy delivery by Dominion.
The option of time-based rates that give customers the opportunities 
to shift electricity use to off-peak times for additional savings.
Proactive reporting of outages, allowing for quicker restoration of service.
The future introduction of in-home energy displays, and AMI-enabled 
direct load control devices.
The integration of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles
The effective integration of green distributed generation

Dominion Virginia Power is a subsidiary of Dominion (NYSE: D), one of the nation's largest producers of energy. Dominion has a portfolio of more than 27,500 megawatts of generation and Dominion serves retail energy customers in 12 states.