Can I make money out of being green?

You'll earn plenty of credit going green, but what about cold, hard cash? Lucy Siegle looks at your eco economics

Lucy Siegle
The Observer, Sunday 24 May 2009

Unless you are excessively A-list, you can rule out selling the contents of your bin. Recycling can pay, depending on materials, but it pays reprocessors and not consumers. Such is the ubiquity of e-waste (electrical and electronic equipment) that most of us now consider ourselves lucky if we get a manufacturer to recycle discarded fax machines or computers for free when we buy a new model (they are required to do this by law, but some still charge).
However, if you look hard you can still make money out of e-waste. If the piece in question is still a reasonable bit of kit, try auctionpeople.co.uk, where you'll get a cut of the proceeds. Alternatively, some manufacturers offer incentives or gift cards for old appliances: Apple will give you a 10% discount on the purchase of a new iPod and Hewlett-Packard offers a number of rebates (eu.trade-in.hp.com).
If Britain had a container-deposit scheme you could generate some extra income returning other people's empties, as in South Australia, New York or Denmark. You would hardly clean up, but strikingly, litter rates in New York declined by 30% when a deposit scheme was introduced. Also, in parts of the US, the Consumer Powerline, a "demand response" scheme, pays electricity users to turn off their lights during peak energy time to avoid overloading the grid.
The nearest comparable project here is probably Economy 7, where you're rewarded for using off-peak energy with favourable rates. Otherwise, British attempts to make power pay still revolve around microgeneration (creating power on a small scale) and selling it back to the grid. Sometimes this works. I came across a couple last week on a suburban estate in the southwest using second-hand solar photovoltaics, selling a worthwhile amount of energy back to the grid. Several energy companies offer tariffs, but the sticking point tends to be the cost of installing equipment in the first place, as the payback period is so long. Off-grid.net features a spirited piece on refashioning broken panels, which is a cheaper means of joining the very slow renewables revolution. It is too soon to evaluate EDF's new Eco Renew product, but it does seem to offer "low-carbon" technologies, such as solar panels, at more competitive rates (savetodaysavetomorrow.com).
We Brits are better at indirect eco earning, with the balance going to charity, as evidenced by the hundreds of mobile-phone recycling link-ups with charities. If altruism is in short supply then envirofone.com and foneback.com will make you a cash offer for old phones. Meanwhile, M&S's Clothing Exchange programme is a goodwill/mercantile hybrid. You can bring any old M&S clothes to one of Oxfam's 700 shops in exchange for a £5 M&S voucher (oxfam.org.uk/donate/shops/marksandspencer). So yes, you can make green pay, but it's not easy money.
lucy.siegle@observer.co.uk