It’s no secret that a primary factor in today’s credit crunch was our inability to say no simply because the geeks at Best Buy said it was OK - why pay now when no one else is!

As house values rose, so too did consumer confidence, borrowing against their primary asset. Buying that 42″ LCD screen to replace the 38″ was a reality, not just a fantasy.

Apple and Sony never had it so good. In those gravy years all the electronics giants were churning out wave after wave of upgrades, sometimes only weeks after the previous models to take advantage of a new sea of credit rich consumer spending.

The consistent weakness of the dollar over the past few years was a sure sign that too many dollars were chasing too much product - and now that the money has gone, the dollar has regained 30% over other major currencies in the past 4 months alone.

So how is this going to create a greener economy?

For starters, the good old days of endless upgrades by the electronics industry is surely over for the foreseeable future. When money was cheap, consumers could ignore that there wasn’t much difference between a 4 Mega pixel and a 5 mega pixel camera - they just wanted the latest one.

Over the last decade, the lifespan of the average electronics product shrunk from 6 years to 3. This more than quadrupled the size of ewaste junk yards still festering in Asia, polluting the water sources of countless villages. As the electronics feeding frenzy dries up, the amount of ewaste on the dumps will diminish significantly.

The beginning of a product’s life also has an impact:

It takes 2 tons of raw material and a rhino’s weight in water to manufacture a new laptop. A drop in demand will spell a significant drop in this energy consumption. What’s more, there will be less freight from China too.

The stock price crash of Sony (among others) is not a second hand reaction to the credit crunch -  projections on future supply and demand is more the culprit here as American Consumers simply won’t be interested in that latest gadget anymore.

The pre-owned market will also suffer

It’s a long held belief that in times of recession, you could always turn to the pre-owned market to be bolstered by such conditions. Not anymore. These days, the pre-owned market has come to rely heavily on one type of consumer (trend setter: I must have it today) - selling onto another type of consumer (value conscious: I must have it tomorrow).

In this credit crunch, unlike the crises of 1991 and 2002, the first type of consumer (trend setter) will be wiped off of the map. There simply won’t be the amount of sellers that there were, and this harsh new reality has hit eBay shares (and revenue) in ways that few thought possible.

The pre-owned consumer market will fair better than most, but it will not enjoy the pre-owned gravy train of previous recessions.

Fewer goods being bought new and fewer being manufactured is one definition of a recession. However, a greener economy shares this definition also.

Over the past few years, the consumer electronics industry spent millions on promoting their green credentials, while churning out more CO2 than ever before. Now that the market for their products has fallen, they’ll be saving billions of tons of CO2 for the first time. Most, however, will decline to promote such an astonishing achievement.