Saving Computers and the Planet
COOPER: Have you ever thought about how many computers you'll use over your lifetime? More to the point, have you thought about the toll all those computers will take on the planet once you toss them out? The teen you're about to meet has thought a lot about this and he's come up with a solution. Here's Stephanie Elam with tonight's "One Simple Thing" report.</s>STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Sixteen-year-old Alex Lin likes to go for impact. Besides the rigors of AP classes and competitive sports, the high school senior has made helping others while also protecting the environment an important part of his schedule.</s>ALEXANDER LIN, WIN FOUNDER: When you're throwing out hundreds of thousands of tons of computers it all adds up. And especially back when everybody was using CRT monitors. Each of those big monitors had between four and eight pounds of lead. Add that up and that a lot of lead going into our land fills, going to our ground and going under water.</s>ELAM: Driven to find creative solutions for his community's problems, Alex began WIN, Westerly Innovations Network with a galvanized group of peers.</s>JEFF BRODIE, WIN TEAM MEMBER: It takes a good amount of time. You really have to be dedicated to doing something this big.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I love helping people. I love that that's what we do.</s>ELAM: Working with his hometown of Westerly, Rhode Island, he set up a place to recycle old computers and monitors.</s>LIN: If we use it, we'll take it in so we can refurbish it. If not, we'll bring it to the transportation (ph) to recycle it. Most of the computers have gone to students here in Westerly locally. Also we have a separate section of the computers we refurbished which have gone overseas to community centers.</s>ELAM: To places in Kenya, Cameroon, the Philippines, Mexico and Sri Lanka, where the computer center was named after the WIN Team.</s>LIN: That was one of the more awesome parts of our project, let's say, when we found out there is a place pretty literally half away cross the world that was actually named after our project.</s>ELAM: But WIN wanted to do more, so they introduced an ordinance to ban the dumping of electronics in Westerly.</s>LIN: Eventually, we did get the law passed statewide. We can hopefully get this out to around the entire nation to where there are these systems in place to properly dispose of electronics, just like there are systems to dispose of aluminum, paper, and plastics.</s>ELAM: As Alex heads to Stanford University in the fall, he says he'll keep solving problems.</s>LIN: I'll find something new or some other way to make myself active and have lasting impact. But definitely something like this, maybe not exactly this.</s>ELAM: Stephanie Elam, CNN, Westerly, Rhode Island.</s>COOPER: Hey, that does it for 360. Thanks for watching. "LARRY KING" starts now. I'll see you tomorrow night.