Touch these apps, stay in touch with the earth

Apps for the environment and sustainability find the nearest places to recycle neon lights, corks, and crayons. One app makes you part of a social network to document species. Another helps identify products made with fair trade and green objectives in mind.

The free GoodGuide application from GoodGuide Inc. for Android and iPhone rates thousands of products on a zero to 10 scale to indicate whether they are "healthy, safe, green and socially responsible." Get the rating by scanning a barcode from within the app. It also lets you fine-tune results by setting personal preferences on a range of matters such as nutrition, "controversial ingredients," and impact on climate change.

The app is supposed to have data on more than 120,000 products. Unfortunately, they didn't include many already in my kitchen. The box of Lucky Charms on my shelf had a middling 5.8 overall score. But the app identified a jar of black pepper as Old Spice body spray.

Project Noah, by Networked Organisms L.L.C., is a free iPhone app to use when you spot wildlife. Take a picture of an interesting animal, bug or tree, and submit it with the app. If you don't know what it is, other users will help with identification. In the process, you'll be adding to a database of flora and fauna that's meant to be available to study groups and professional researchers.

By tapping the "nearby" icon, you can also get a look at the weird critters that other people have photographed in your area. I felt like putting on repellant spray after seeing the collection of spiders, worms, snakes and beetles that turned up.

The app called iRecycle for Android and Apple is free. It's a source for news and recycling tips from the website earth911.com,cq where I found the headline, "Greece goes solar to relieve debt" – a truly doubtful prospect. But anyway, when you have something that you want to recycle, you select its category from a screen of icons for categories such as automotive, household, or construction material. Drill down to find out where to donate or dispose of what you've got. Share what you find via the usual social-media conduits.

To really get in touch with the earth, I downloaded Quakes – Earthquake Notifications, a free app by Ming Lu. The phone hasn't stopped shaking since. The app alerts users to reports of seismic activity anywhere on the globe, and gets more popular with every temblor. The earthquake reports are from the U.S. Geological Survey's earthquake.gov site.

Contact staff writer Reid Kanaley at 215-854-5114, rkanaley@phillynews.com or @ReidKan on Twitter.