Here’s a neat Instructables project if you’d like to charge your iPhone or iPod Touch using the sun’s rays (and a little elbow grease). Using an Altoids tin–the modern tinkerer’s mobile enclosure of choice–and roughly $70 in parts, you too can build this solar variant of the MintyBoost.

As the MightyMintyBoost guide points out, if every one of the 30 million iPod Touch/iPhones that Apple sold “was fully charged every day (averaging the battery capacity) via solar power instead of fossil fuel power we would save approximately 50.644gWh of energy, roughly equivalent to 75,965,625 lbs. of CO2 in the atmosphere per year.”

If you’re new to solar projects, this is a good start. Who knows, you may get bitten by the bug and start some more ambitious solar installs.

Examiner.com has a great article on the MightyMintyBoost’s inventor, Jerome Kelty, that’s also worth a read.