Social Responsibility
We are committed to preserving and enhancing the environment and leveraging the social impacts of the Walking Charger™ and our other future products. Energy Harvesters LLC is helping to define the trend of wearable electronics and bring a mobile charging system to market for on-demand battery recharging.
Environmental Benefits
Our product’s innovative design yields significant environmental benefits. The Walking Charger creates no emissions in its energy delivery and it directly recharges mobile device batteries, so consumers will no longer need to purchase extra backup batteries. If consumers purchase fewer batteries, this reduces demand on the grid, lessens the disposal risk associated with toxic battery components, lowers the need to mine the hazardous materials for battery production and ultimately saves energy that would have been spent on extra battery production.
Recycling Program
Energy Harvesters plans to offer consumers a Walking Charger recycling program. Since we anticipate that the Walking Charger device will outlive the footwear in which it is embedded, we want to responsibly reuse, refurbish and recycle the Walking Charger’s component parts as needed. We also plan to work with our footwear brand partners, their respective retailers and third-party vendors to recycle discarded footwear from which the Walking Charger device has been extracted.
Our plan is to partner with the footwear brands to offer consumers a recycling program. We hope to provide our corporate partners with a value-added service that helps them to mitigate product end-of-life issues, thereby shrinking their own eco-footprint and increasing consumer brand loyalty.
Provide personal power for people in developing countries
The World Bank reports that of the 6 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, an astounding 5 billion subscriptions are in developing countries. But in these developing countries, the spread of cell phones has outpaced the growth of the charging infrastructure. According to the Green Power for Mobile report by the GSMA Development Fund, “nearly 500 million people worldwide do not have a means of charging a mobile phone at home.”
As our production volumes increase over time, we hope to be able to offer the Walking Charger at an affordable price for consumers in developing countries. For these consumers, having a personal power-charging platform embedded in their footwear could be a truly life-changing improvement.