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For short hops around town, to run errands or to just enjoy the countryside up close, ditch your car for an E-bike: The boost your pedaling will get from an electric motor, when you want it, gives you the freedom to get around town unencumbered, get some exercise and enjoy the outdoors. You can bike 15-20 miles before you'll need to recharge the batteries.

The green revolution was a major focus Wednesday morning, as it has been throughout CES so far. LG announced that its 2009 HDTVs are being designed to achieve the newest Energy Star 3.0 rating. The company is rolling out the "Life's Green 2020" initiative, which will cut greenhouse gas emissions by two points in the product lifecycle -- in the manufacturing process, where the company aims to cut emissions by 150 kilotons/year by 2020, and with the products themselves, for an additional decrease of 30 megatons/year by 2020. One of the few products to get more than a few sentences of introduction may be coming to your town soon, but it's not likely you're in the market. The LG Skycharger, a solar- and wind-powered charging station, can handle up to 104 phones (of various makes, not only LG) in its lockable cubbyholes, dispensing up to 1.8 kilowatts of power among them. Drop a gadget off and it'll be charged in about an hour; unused power goes into the station's battery bank in case it gets both calm and dark. Who's buying? Think large outdoor venues...or disaster-recovery agencies. The Skycharger will, according to the company, be making a US tour in 2009. It's the first of its kind in the nation.

Everything has its season, and recycling interest is no different. Maybe it's because everyone is trying to make room in their houses after the holiday gifts pour in. Or maybe it's some sort of New Year's resolution. Or just because everyone is issuing press releases tied to the Consumer Electronics Show in that famous town of excess, Las Vegas.

ODATE, JP -- Many small pieces can add up to a big whole, and one small city in the north of Japan is finding there's money in the process as well. Odate, a city of about 80,000 people in Akita Prefecture, on the northern end of Honshu, the big island of Japan, has begun diverting small electronics from landfills and using the town's mining history to salvage precious metals from the waste. By putting collection bins outside supermarkets and community centers, the city gathering about 17 tons of e-waste in 11 months, from April 2007 to February 2008, according to a report from Harufumi Mori in Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The gadgets collected range from broken appliances to hair dryers to cell phones -- all too small to fall under the scope of recycling laws in Japan. Although they're small, they're far from worthless, the city is finding. After looking through just over one-third of the waste, Mori reports that the city might find as much as half a kilogram of tantalum, one kilogram of gold, and as much as 4 kilograms of silver and palladium. All from less than one year of collections in one city among a gadget-crazy country with over 127 million residents. As a former mining town, Odate is well equipped to harvest precious metals from e-waste.

Discussions are underway for the creation of an e-waste depot in Winkler.