E-waste Youth Activist

And this year he received the prestigious Brower Youth Award for young environmental leaders. "Living on Earth’s" Steve Curwood interviewed the young social entreprenuer.

LIN: "I think what helped me choose to do this was that it’s such a little known problem, really. When we started our project in our town, like, when we found out how many people knew about it, it was just less than 15 percent. It was like, ten percent or so of residents even knew what E-waste was, so I mean, just the fact that it’s so little known and that by raising awareness we could just do so much to help it. That kind of grabbed our attention when we started the project."

Lin took his idea from the local to the global.

LIN: "Right now one of our contacts and friends in Cameroon — Rosemary — and she’s been helping us to establish WIN teams in Africa and she’s been looking around in Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon. Right now we have two definite set-up WIN teams in Kenya and Cameroon and the rest are on the way. And she’s also helped us a lot by looking for schools that need computers so that computers in the U.S. used by companies in large numbers can be reused and sent to people across the world who really need these computers to help better their lives. And we have a Mexican WIN team who’s raising awareness. And right now I think Rosemary’s been talking with a team in the UK about starting a group there and we’re just kind of dealing with it as it comes because it’s been coming pretty fast for the past couple of months. But we’re going to have to do the work and we’re ready to do it, I guess."

PRI’s coverage of social entrepreneurship is supported by the Skoll Foundation.