when to buy green, when to keep it brown
Friday, May 15th, 2009In a previous post discussing carbon neutral, Peter raised a valid question about the replacement of old technology with new technology, knowing that new technology will have a lesser net effect on the environment (and your wallet).
To describe this through an example: A new, environmentally efficient, low water consuming laundry machine requires a huge amount of raw materials to build and ship to your home prior to saving you water and energy. However, using the old washer uses twice as much water, and twice as much power. So, the question is, when does it make sense to replace an older appliance with a newer one.
In other words, when does….
cost of running the technology + cost of removing old technology
EQUAL
cost of running new technology + cost of producing new technology
????
Where cost is the environmental cost.
Of course, this is next to impossible to determine. Why? Probably because the economy wants you to continue purchasing - it keeps them in business. The same way 3 years from now, a new and improved laundry machine will be introduced, which everyone MUST have. Thus the cycle continues.
Of course, I’m quite guilty of this myself, but I’m trying hard to consider this when making unnecessary purchases - like cameras.




Searching for cars was a little buggy - if you select or unselect ’show me cars that are unavailable’ it doesn’t behave the way you would think. Someone needs to look at that, it’s not consistent. In my case, I wanted to find out when a truck was available, so not being able to see all trucks in the area that were booked or not booked was a little frustrating. But I figured out a way to make it work.
Why aren’t LED lights more popular? Why didn’t they catch on? They seem to exist for cars, flashlights, outdoor lights, and other applications - but not household bulbs? I suppose they haven’t tackled the directional light problems yet, but you figure someone would be working on that.