Conspicuous green consumption

I bought a Solio solar-powered device charger, which arrived the other day. Here's some pictures of it charging in my car. I haven't really had a chance to test it out yet since it is not charged. I'll post a report at a later date.

Economic arguments

The argument against forcing the market to recognize costs that it currently does not. For example, what if the cost of doing business included costs for disposing of waste:

A representative of the auto industry warned that adopting the new California standards would be “counterproductive,” raising the price of cars, costing jobs and imposing inconsistent auto emissions standards around the country.

Or what if the cost of labor increased:

MARRIOTT: If we don't get the workers, the growth in the hospitality industry, the restaurant industry is going to slow markedly. And I think it could cause labor costs in this country to escalate tremendously. We can have runaway inflation and we could, at the same time, have a recession. We could have the worst of all worlds on the economic front.

Oh no, economic failure! The market can't handle more costs. We need to avoid paying for these things. It's too much of a burden on the system.

But wait, isn't the market designed to drive down costs? Isn't that the strong point of free market capitalism?

The benefits of competition and free choice are driven home in the first few pages, when Cannon and Tanner describe experiences with some of the few medical services where patients pay, rather than the government or private insurance.

For instance, in the cosmetic surgery market, "patients pay directly and therefore must weigh the costs and benefits of each procedure. As a result, inflation-adjusted prices have fallen every year from 1992 to 2001," they note.

The authors add, "Patients also weigh the costs and benefits of laser eye surgery, another highly competitive market where prices have fallen dramatically. ... It is also notable that these falling prices occur despite the fact that more than 80 percent of Lasik patients search for an experienced surgeon with a strong reputation, rather than just the lowest price."

I'm so confused now. Thank goodness there are smart people thinking about this for me.

It's like a disease

This is the chart I thought I was looking at in the first place. It plots the total amount of energy used as the number of uses increases. The number of uses along the bottom are in factors of 10. So it goes out to 1500 uses.



Somewhere around 700 uses, the foam cup starts to be more expensive than the ceramic.

I swear, I'm done with this.

I can't leave this alone

Ok, just two points.

1) Of course using foam cups incurs variable energy costs. Every time you throw one away, it has to be carried to the dump. I don't know anything about MJs. And maybe the energy cost of taking one foam cup on a garbage truck is so tiny that it doesn't matter. But look what happens when you assume that the energy cost is 1/10,000th of an MJ.



See the way that line starts to grow? At 1,500 uses, you're almost at twice the Average Total Cost than one use. That's the power of big numbers.

2) You could cut the energy use in the foam option significantly by simply reusing foam cups. If you use the same cup twice before throwing it out, you cut the already low energy use in half, making it a much more attractive option.

Eco-update

Here's an update to my previous post, explaining some of the things I left out.
I assume that Hockett used the formula for the Average Total Cost to create the graphs in the original graph. I used the formula found at about.com:

Average Total Cost = Fixed Costs/Quantity + Variable Costs

In the case of the ceramic mug, that would be AC = 14/Quantity + 0.18 since each mug costs 14 mj to make and 0.18 mj to clean after each use. Here are the other formulas I used to recreate the graph:

Foam: AC = .2 (There are no variable costs, and a new foam cup is used every time)
Paper: AC = .55 (See foam.)
Glass: AC = 5.5/Quantity + 0.18
Plastic: AC = 6.3/Quantity + 0.18

To find the area under the curve for, I used an Excel plug in from Boomer.org--scroll down to "PK Functions for Microsoft Excel".

You can use the area under the curve numbers to calculate just how many mjs you would save by using ceramic, glass, or plastic instead of foam or paper.



Using a ceramic mug twice a day for about 2 years will save 1,639 MJ over using foam cups. That's a savings of 8,195 foam cups (1639/.2)! Still, your better bet is the plastic coffee mug which saves you 13,112 MJ over those 2 years--65,560 foam cups!

See Peter's correction in the comments!

Ceramic or styrofoam?

I sometimes wonder why Starbucks doesn't use ceramic coffee cups for in-store purchases. Maybe they read the article by Hocking.
philliptorrone at MAKE: Blog has commented on an article from Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment on the comparison of different materials used in making coffee cups (based on a 1994 article by Martin Hocking in Environmental Management). The key point is that the initial energy cost of creating a ceramic coffee cup is so much larger than that needed to create a foam coffee cup that it takes years of use to break even.

Figure 1 - The energy per use of each reusable cup (black lines) declines as it is used more times. The energy per use of each disposable cup (green lines) is a constant equal to the manufacturing energy, since it is used only once and is never washed. The numbers in the labels are the manufacturing energies for the different cups.

BillyTheClown had the same reaction I did in the comments section:

The Horrible flaw in this graph is that the energy cost of the reusable cup is not flat as the graph shows.

The graph should be increasing for each use. If you assume the cup is used once as stated in the report then the energy is increases with each use since you need a new cup, were with the reusable cup the energy use decreases with each use.

However, boxcarbill set us straight:

no. the y axis is enegy per use. how you describe it, your second cup would take twice as much energy to make as the first.
energy cost (area under the line) does double with non-reuseable cups.

Ah, it's the area under the curve that we're looking at. But that explanation didn't make me completely comfortable with the graph.

The graph is still misleading for two reasons. First, it highlights the lines, not the area under the lines. That's where my and BillyTheClown's problem comes in. And second, it only shows the energy costs up to 200 uses. The real action in this question occurs between 400 and about 1000 uses, as this chart from the same source shows.


Table 2 - Break-even matrix. Each number shows the uses necessary before the reusable cup listed on the left, becomes equally energy efficient to the disposable cup listed on the top.

Here's a revised chart calculated out to 1500 uses for just ceramic and foam cups.

(Updated chart to include paper, plastic, and glass.)

The area under the curve for the ceramic cup is 223,351 MJ. For the foam, it's 224,990 MJ. So if you use a ceramic cup twice a day for about 2 years, it will be more energy efficient than using a foam cup twice a day for 2 years. But maybe not by much. The real savings are in the plastic or glass cups.

Source: Hocking, Martin B. "Reusable and Disposable Cups: An Energy-Based Evaluation." Environmental Management 18(6) pp. 889-899.