Modern life, increasingly, involves portable technology. Whether
it’s laptops, cell-phones, MP3 players, handheld games or all of
the above, all that tech requires juice to keep it running,
creating an ever-increasing carbon footprint. One way to nip
this vicious cycle in the bud is to use an off-grid
charger–i.e., one that does not need to get plugged in to
produce juice for your portables. As the market for such
“advanced charging technologies” has grown over the years (it’s
estimated this year to total $1.5, and to reach a whopping $34
billion by 2015), solar chargers have proven some of the most
popular. Solar chargers make use of a photovoltaic solar
panel–often thin-film–to harness the sun’s energy and turn it
into electricity, acting as a portable primary or back-up
charger for a variety of portable devices, via a large number of
adaptor “tips,” typically included in the price of purchase. As
an added bonus, these chargers (like most off-grid chargers) are
nearly universal, knocking out the e-waste ass