Comment by robocat
5 days ago
> create so much pollution and waste in the process
Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage).
Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
>Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
No, it depends on what you do with that income.
>Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time.
I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought for me as a child decades ago. They are literally "as good as new", much of the IKEA furniture I had to replace. Clearly the IKEA furniture had a bigger impact, although it was "cheaper".
>Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
All complaining I do is pointless. Obviously no institution who could force change is making decisions based on my HN posts.
> create much less landfill
But maybe bought from a salesman with a Humvee and a artisan that spends every last cent on overseas travel
The issue is that trying to analyse the breakdown of $ by environmental outcomes is hard.
There is a lot of propoganda about how to be environmentally sound. We tend to pick one dimension like trash output. We lack the information to be able to make better balanced decisions, for example sometimes the throwaway thing is better for the environment.
> expensive shelfs
I think that example is selection bias. I'm sure you can think of plenty of expensively wasteful examples too (it's easiest to look at other people to find that).
Counter-factual: I made some shelves from waste-stream offcuts, and other shelves were going to be thrown out. Plus costs to paint them (much much less than even the cheapest of new shelves).
You are speaking from the position of privilege. Not everyone is as lucky as you are in your country, let alone the world.