5 ms·

Huh, that strikes me as such a large-carbon-footprint way of living, but to each their own.

SargeDebian 3y ago
Compared to replacing electronics or making a dent in food waste, I wonder how a few pieces of particleboard furniture every few years stack up.
- massysett 3y ago
  It's so easy to see a large piece of furniture in the trash and think "OMG so much waste" and to toss a 10-year-old Android tablet in the trash and think "no big deal," but of course I have no idea how much more metals, plastics, waste, etc. went into that old tablet. It just seems like less waste because the volume and weight is smaller - but the disposing user doesn't see how much the manufacturing process consumed. It would be interesting to see some sort of resource that compares waste in this manner.
zztop44 3y ago
For someone else, eating meat or taking international holidays might strike them as a large-carbon-footprint way of living.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Since that may also be true for rngname22, it's entirely irrelevant.
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
Not necessarily. Remember that cheaper to make often also means less resource intensive. Some IKEA products are little more than very well engineered and carefully packaged cardboard without looking like it (the LACK table, for example, but also the newer wardrobe doors). Sending it to the local waste-to-energy plant and buying new stuff, three times, doesn't necessarily have to be meaningfully worse for the environment than buying "solid" stuff once, then moving it twice over a long distance (in a relatively inefficient, one-off move rather than large-scale logistics).
- rngname22 3y ago
  I just move my Ikea furniture with me, I don't know why the only alternative is to buy heavy duty stuff. And I just ignore nicks and dents because it seems wasteful to replace a desk just because of a chip.
shagie 3y ago
Consider also the additional cost of moving the (bulky) furniture. Consider if you're moving cities (lets say 250 miles) and going from a 10' van to a 17' van (with the assorted Ikea furniture) moves you from 12mpg to 10mpg - that's 20 gallons of gas to 25 gallons of gas. That's an extra 45 kg of CO2 emissions. Buying new furniture at the new destination then is a smaller incremental cost of going to Ikea anyways. And while I'll admit that this is a very simplistic analysis, the corresponding assertion that doing this is a larger carbon footprint may fail to take into account some nuances.

Compared to replacing electronics or making a dent in food waste, I wonder how a few pieces of particleboard furniture every few years stack up.

massysett 3y ago
It's so easy to see a large piece of furniture in the trash and think "OMG so much waste" and to toss a 10-year-old Android tablet in the trash and think "no big deal," but of course I have no idea how much more metals, plastics, waste, etc. went into that old tablet. It just seems like less waste because the volume and weight is smaller - but the disposing user doesn't see how much the manufacturing process consumed. It would be interesting to see some sort of resource that compares waste in this manner.

zztop44 3y ago

For someone else, eating meat or taking international holidays might strike them as a large-carbon-footprint way of living.

pessimizer 3y ago
Since that may also be true for rngname22, it's entirely irrelevant.

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

Not necessarily. Remember that cheaper to make often also means less resource intensive. Some IKEA products are little more than very well engineered and carefully packaged cardboard without looking like it (the LACK table, for example, but also the newer wardrobe doors). Sending it to the local waste-to-energy plant and buying new stuff, three times, doesn't necessarily have to be meaningfully worse for the environment than buying "solid" stuff once, then moving it twice over a long distance (in a relatively inefficient, one-off move rather than large-scale logistics).

rngname22 3y ago
I just move my Ikea furniture with me, I don't know why the only alternative is to buy heavy duty stuff. And I just ignore nicks and dents because it seems wasteful to replace a desk just because of a chip.

shagie 3y ago

Consider also the additional cost of moving the (bulky) furniture. Consider if you're moving cities (lets say 250 miles) and going from a 10' van to a 17' van (with the assorted Ikea furniture) moves you from 12mpg to 10mpg - that's 20 gallons of gas to 25 gallons of gas. That's an extra 45 kg of CO2 emissions. Buying new furniture at the new destination then is a smaller incremental cost of going to Ikea anyways. And while I'll admit that this is a very simplistic analysis, the corresponding assertion that doing this is a larger carbon footprint may fail to take into account some nuances.