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Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, February 05, 2009 at 21:34:16 :
In Reply to: Re: It's a throw away world posted by Arthur P. Bloom on Thursday, February 05, 2009 at 21:09:16 :
Arthur, if they kept the CRTs until they wore out, and then replaced them with flat screens, you'd have a point about landfill space and toxic waste, but that's not what they do. They junk boatloads of perfectly functional CRTs because everybody wants a flat screen in their office now. There is no such thing as improving the environment by junking a still-working old machine and replacing it with a new "green" one. The energy and resources consumed in making and transporting the new machine, whether it's a computer screen, a car, or a washing machine, adds up to way more than the energy "waste" of keeping the old machine until the end of its natural life.
The only reason we're bombarded with messages telling us to "buy green" is that that's the one place the mainstream environmental groups and the industry lobbyists can agree. The environmentalists like the word "green", and the industrialists like the word "buy". But if a person really cares about the environment, they will do the truly radical thing, and not buy anything new if they can possibly help it. The old machine you keep running, or salvage when somebody else junks it, is the way "greener" than buying a new one, no matter how energy-efficient the new one is.
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