Father's Day: 5 gifts to 'green' your dad

Here are five energy-saving Father's Day gift ideas to help 'green' your dad:

WakaWaka Power

Dado Ruvic/Reuters
Men are silhouetted against a video screen with as they pose with a smartphone in this photo illustration taken in the central Bosnian town of Zenica.

Home solar panels make an unwieldily gift, but the WakaWaka power solar charger will fit in the palm of your eco-friendly dad's hand. The portable device can recharge most smartphones in under two hours using only the power of the sun.

The company originally designed it as a portable, rechargeable light to use in rural parts of the world that rely on inefficient and potentially dangerous kerosene lamps. But any father eyeing life off the grid will appreciate using a renewable source of energy to keep his batteries charged.

WakaWaka's solar charger costs $79, and the company says it uses proceeds to make the product available to off-grid communities around the world at a more affordable charge. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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