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.
It’s what we’re being told to do by every consumer electronics institution on the block, from Best Buy to Apple. But what actually happens to that monitor or PC once we drop it off and slip back into our Prius’s, tutting smugly at passing Hummers?
Well don’t feel so green greenies, because although your PC will no longer end up in a landfill somewhere in Alabama, it WILL be sold by the tonnage (for a healthy profit I might add) to the highest bidding e-waste merchant, who’ll then pile it high on a gas guzzling tanker to be shipped off to Hong Kong. From there it will be resold to another trader until it eventually ends up on the swelling e-waste dumps of China.
Yes - these pictures are real, and these children do die of lead and mercury poisoning as they blow-torch or hack their way through millions of circuit boards.
Still - there are plenty of children where she came from when she reaches a life expectancy of 15 - and plenty of throw-away PCs, laptops, monitors, MP3 players, speakers, headphones, cellphones etc to grow the never ending mountain of e-waste being created to the rapturous sound of iTunes.
I make no secret of my suspicion of recycling programs and the greener than green recycling stores, many of whom actually charge to recycle your e-waste, only to make a clean (or dirty) profit as they shift it along the dirt never ending conveyor belt to China.
Is there an alternative? For an eight year old PC maybe not - none of the internals are up to date, but the real crime is that most of the stuff ending up on e-waste dumps today are between 2 and 3 years old.
The bottom line is that most people today upgrade after about a year or so and leave their old laptop or cellphone lying around in a bottom draw until it’s no longer any good to anyone - before driving down to that (ever so lovely) environmental store with green tea and rose who’ll take it off your hands for $15 - you’ll get back into your Prius, tut at a Hummer and - well I think we’ve been here several million consumers before - Oh what a gravy train - an industry booming at both ends!
If people sold their one or two year old digital cameras, PCs, laptops, cellphones as pre-owned, and if possible, upgraded to another pre-owned but up to date model, then the e-waste merchants would suddenly find their business cut by 75% within a couple of years. The buy, sell or trade pre-owned model as advocated by new trading portal trade 2 save needs to feature strongly in the minds of Americans if the problem of ewaste is to be tackled in the short to medium term.
The downside to this, of course, is that the profits of Sony, Apple, Samsung and Acer among others would suffer from fewer sales. But then, is this such a terrible thing? We love the things they give us, but at some point we have to conclude that it may be too much of a good thing.
Upgrading to stay ahead with technology is becoming more and more important. It’s about time that as Americans we started to do it responsibly - oh and guess what - you’ll say a fist full of dollars too!
At a time when everyone is looking for ways to save money, what could be better than saving money and helping to save the planet at the same time. This is what you can do when you trade in your old model and upgrade it to a model you want which is pre-owned and works and looks perfectly fine. 
OK, so you won’t have the self gratifying pleasure of pulling a virginal iPod out of the factory sealed sleave for the very first time, but hey, you’ll have a staggering effect on the global e-waste crisis, if you and a few million other Americans thought the same way.
And after a few days of owning it, you’d have forgotten you bought it pre-owned in the first place!
Upgrading to stay ahead is paramount for tech enthusiasts, many of whom are now upgrading their first generation iPhone after just 6-8 months of use.
You’d be surprised what you can find pre-owned. Many people may use a cellphone for a month, or even less and want to get something else, or perhaps a newer model has just come out. Maybe they were given a free upgrade by their phone company and are quite happy with the one they’ve got.
Virtually anything that has been on the market for a few weeks is available pre-owned in a like new condition.
So why does buy it pre-owned reduce e-waste and your carbon footprint? Buying it pre-owned means that you are reducing the demand for that product by one unit. 
And if you go ahead and trade it in or sell it to someone else down the line, you are reducing the demand for a new one to be sold to someone else by another unit again (because he’s buying a pre-owned one off you instead of a new one from Best Buy).
When you trade it in and purchase another pre-owned, again, you are reducing the demand for another product too – and so the cycle continues. Now imagine a few million consumers having the same idea?
Each MP3 player, for example, takes roughly 300 lbs of CO2 to produce. Then there’s the small matter of transportation by road and shipping to the store (from China usually) and ultimately to you. Millions of products – millions of upgrades, millions of tons of e-waste every year, the cycle is endless.
When you buy pre-owned instead of new it means that at the end of the product’s life, there will 3 to 4 times less of that product ending up as e-waste, because as you have reduced the demand, less is being produced as a consequence, especially when you are one of thousands of consumers wanting to save money when they upgrade, and reduce their carbon footprint in the process.
But it’s not just millions of tons of less e-waste every year. China’s demand for oil projected over the next decade has created the speculative price surges we see today. What most people don’t know is that this isn’t totally the blame of Chinese People lining outside the Cadillac showroom in Beijing.
Manufacturing is the biggest single consumer of oil in China, and the biggest (and fastest growing) sector of manufacturing is, yes you guessed it, consumer electronics.
Steve Jobs would love you to upgrade every time he brings out a new iPod or iPhone. Well, providing you trade in your old model (and keep it nice for the next person) and then buy a pre-owned upgrade that someone else may have had for a few weeks or months, then you’ll be doing exactly what he wants and saving money and the planet in the process. Not sure he’d be as happy as I’m suggesting though.
Trading portals like trade 2 save will enable consumers to buy, sell and trade their used electronics, computers, games and movies - with more confidence and for better value so they can upgrade readily while still saving money and reducing ewaste.
A national study commissioned by the Consumer Electronics Association shows that using electronics to telecommute saves the equivalent of 9 to 14 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year — the same amount of energy used by roughly 1 million U.S. households every year.
The study, “The Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Impact of Telecommuting and e-Commerce,” was commissioned by CEA to determine energy savings and CO2 reductions that result from the nation’s increased use of electronics, such as personal computers and wireless networks.
“This report demonstrates that consumer electronics are part of a climate change solution, as the use of electronics is preventing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing fossil fuel consumption,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CEA.
The CEA study, conducted by TIAX LLC of Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that just one day of telecommuting saves the equivalent of up to 12 hours of an average household’s electricity use.
Telecommuting also saves 1.4 gallons of gasoline and reduces CO2 emissions by 17 to 23 kilograms per day, showing the power of one individual to impact their environment in a single day by using electronics, said Shapiro.
If that same worker, with a one-way commute of 22 miles, telecommuted five days a week, she would save about 320 gallons of gasoline and reduce CO2 emissions by 4.5 to 6 tons per year, according to TIAX researchers.
He or she would also save an amount of energy equivalent to roughly 4,000 to 6,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which is comparable to the electricity consumed by an average household in 4 to 6 months.
United States official carbon footprint data video has been published in full color, showing hot spot areas of concern. It shows the detailed emissions of all 9 million square kilometers and plots down to 100 square meter areas.
The Vulcan project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to quantify our fossil fuel CO2 emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past.
The detail and scope of the Vucan CO2 inventory makes it a valuable tool for policymakers, demographers and socail scientists.
This comes on the foot of Al Gore’s presentation evidencing the pace of climate change may be worse than what scientists have been recently predicting.
Evidence coming from the Vulcan project will back this call to challenge Americans to act with a sense of common urgency and ‘general mission… the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement.
He also called on the 3 presidential candidates to back up what they have been advocating on the campaign trail.
“(all) nominees have a very different and forward leaning position on the climate crisis… they’re saying the right things and should do the right thing when elected.”
He went on to say that every citizen should become an active participant in cimate change via personal action to activate legislative change on what he termed “the sclerosis in our civilization”.
For further reading go to Ted’s profile on Al Gore
A few days ago I wrote on the fact that internet usage was creating more emissions than aviation. Thankfully those bright people at Oxford University have come up with ways to address the balance.
Oxford are pioneering an energy saving research project to develop software that is free and easy to download, which will make networked computers more energy-efficient and reduce carbon emissions by saving on electricity needs. The project, underway at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI), will start with an 18-month pilot project on the Oxford campus, and eventually spread to include educational institutions across the U.K.
The research team on the project will monitor not only energy use, but also cost savings from increase computer downtime. Researchers estimate that most computers are in use less than 25 percent of the time — roughly 40 hours during a 168-hour week.
“No-one sits at their computer for 168 hours a week,” explained Daniel Curtis of Oxford’s ECI. “When a computer is switched on, its power demand remains pretty much constant — regardless of whether its user is surfing the net, word-processing or at home in bed. We are developing a system that will mean that computers only need to be switched on when actually in use.” He went on to add that although this seems like an obvious solution, creating a fix that is easy but doesn’t inconvenience the computer’s users or the IT department at an organization is much trickier.
Curtis estimates that the program can reduce energy consumption by 50 percent in the school’s computers, save nearly half a million dollars and reduce as much as 1,500 tons of carbon emissions each year.
A new tanker has been outfitted with a $725,000 computer-guided kite as an innovative auxiliary propulsion system which will offset fuel costs and allow the vessel to run more efficiently.
The 132 meter long MV “Beluga SkySails” is a joint venture between two companies; Beluga Group and Skysails. The technology steels the principal from kite surfing, now a hugely successful water sport. The 160-square meter kite is expected to reduce fuel costs by up to 20 percent ($1,600 per day) and significantly cut the ship’s carbon dioxide emissions as well.
Global shipping accounts for double the emissions of Aviation Read the rest of this entry »
Global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) usage accounts for approximately 2% of all global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a figure which now eclipses all CO2 emissions caused by aviation.
The world’s computing power should be moved from desktop computers and company servers to remote outposts where renewable energy such as wind and solar power is abundant, according to a Cambridge University computer expert.
With carbon emissions from computing set to rise rapidly in the coming decades, he said his idea could significantly reduce the contribution made by computers to climate change. “There’s something very special about computing power which is very different from heating your house,” said Prof Andy Hopper. “Computing power can be moved around the world and can be done anywhere in the world where the energy is available.”
According to UK government figures, business computing is responsible for 2.8m tonnes of CO2 emissions a year. The UK’s total emissions are just over 554.5m tonnes. Office equipment (of which computers make up about a third) is responsible for 15% of the emissions from a typical office.
Moving energy via the national grid entails significant losses. Hopper’s scheme would work by shifting computer operations to servers close to wind farms that are working at full tilt. On a global scale a network of energy producers could be called upon depending on where energy was most abundant at any time.
“I think it is very interesting to contemplate a world with a smallish number of server farms, huge ones, which are deployed in places where the energy is produced,” he told a conference at the Royal Society in London yesterday. “The whole point is that we are using energy that would otherwise be lost. It is more efficient, more appropriate, cheaper to use it in situ.”
