A complaint I hear quite a lot is that people in the west are so decadent, they throw away a perfectly good mobile phone every two years and buy a new one. But, I mean, mobile phones are tiny. They don't use up that much material. Sometimes it seems the activities targeted by environmentalists has more to do with how much people like them rather than how much energy they consume. Killjoyism.
They might be tiny, but electronics are extremely expensive in terms of environmental impact.
In terms of energy consumption alone, semiconductor manufacturing uses about 10^6 as much energy as metal craft, or 10^7 the one needed for plastics injection (per weight of finished product). Other key measures such as water consumption and pollution are in the same ballpark.
OF course, electronic gadgets are mostly made out of plastic pieces, and ICs are only a tiny fraction of the total weight, which is way we don't pay thousands of dollars for a cell phone. But the size of an object is normally not a good predictor of its environment impact.
A more accurate measure would be the retail price, but then you have to take into account the price distortions such as brand premium. You can do that by using the price of the cheapest competitor instead. This has the advantage of taking into account the energy needed for shipping and storage as well.
> but then you have to take into account the price distortions such as brand premium.
You don't have to take this into account, as the distortion just becomes more pollution. Chances are the brand premium ends up in the pockets of marketing and execs, who spend it. Any* time money is spent it eventually "generates" an equivalent amount of pollution.
* Assuming all regulations are equally applied to all manufactures.
I think you are right, but still... would prefer to keep the model simple.
The purpose of using the price as an indicator is to roughly estimate the inputs required to manufacture a product. Under that assumption, profit margins are noise.
Of course, profits are eventually expended, but so are the cost paid to suppliers, the taxes and so on. You would have to think about velocity of money and the overall macroeconomic effect. This is way overkill.
Or just take the limit as time->infinity and simplify it to price=pollution.
If you want this taken to the logical extreme, see http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf where it is argued that "using dollars = spending gasoline". As oil is the cheapest available energy source, everything eventually becomes oil burnt.
I think it might be helpful to be specific about who is making this claim. Is it a major environmental organization like the Sierra Club? A highly regarded university research group that studies sustainability? An environmental think tank? Or some random crank on the street?
There are lots of crazy or ignorant people in the world who say crazy or ignorant stuff. It doesn't necessarily make sense to ascribe every self-described environmentalist's claims to all environmentalists. This seems like the real world version of nut-picking.
