Brian, 24, Texas - I’m excited to present you with a program that celebrates the last two Nobel Peace Prize concepts: environment and microfinance.

Electronic waste like cell phones pollute the environment (up to 35,000 gallons per phone) and microfinance has been proven to be an effective poverty alleviation tool. In response to these issues and as a fundraising technique, we created the Recycle to Eradicate Poverty program.

In one sentence, we recycle used cell phones to fund microfinance loans to the poor.

At www.onemillioncellphones.com, we allow anyone who has access to the Internet to get pre-paid baggies and make a difference. After entering in your information, we send as many baggies as you want to you so that you can in turn distribute them among events, in offices, to pass out, etc. Each person simply puts their cell phones inside a baggie and places it into their mailbox. 

Using this process, we hope to beat the One Million Cell Phone Challenge. Recycling one million cell phones across America will save 350 trillion gallons of water (enough to stop Niagara Falls for 72 years) and allow 100,000 women to rise from poverty through microfinance (enough to fill the brand new Dallas Cowboys Stadium).

Every community needs champions for the environment.  In more and more communities, those champions are young people just like you.

You can take the lead in educating your peers as well as adults on key environmental challenges facing our planet, and show everyone what simple actions they can take to make things better.

Green Teens, USA is a great example of such a club.  After launching with seed funding from Ashoka GenV, Green Teens has organized events to promote the use of cloth bags, compact fluorescent bulbs, and biodegradable cups.