Thursday, January 04, 2007
Polka Dot Pt.4
I was sitting in my living room the other day staring at my various appliances. You know - TV, DVD player, Freeview box, microwave, toaster, kettle, that sort of thing. As you do. A few thoughts popped into my head. The first thought was that I really need to move the toaster, kettle and microwave into the kitchen where they belong.
My second thought: They keep telling us to switch these things off, because apparently they use as much electricity in stand-by mode as when you're actually using them for the purpose they were intended.
But then I thought - wouldn't be great, if each household object had a rating system, according to how damaging it is for the environment? Wouldn't it be brilliant if everything from lightbulbs to boilers had to be rated? Then you could have - ooh, I don't know - say an "A" for the best things, things that didn't damage the environment, and a scale from "A" all the way through to say "G" for the worst.
I don't know why I thought of "G", but the fact that Vitamins only go up to "E" seems to be completely arbitrary to me, so I thought I'd go up to "G" for the hell of it.
Then I thought: This would only work if you had to display your rating by law, so whenever you go into a shop, all you had to do was look at the label and go: "Oh no, that's an "F"! I don't want an "F" in my house, I want an "A", that's what I want. Boy! Show me all your best "A"s. None of this "F" rubbish."
If only... If only...
Hang on, what's this...?
Just a word of warning. Every time you buy a new thing, you contribute to global warming in some form. Every new thing has to be manufactured, which means more carbon in the atmosphere, and more old stuff in a landfill. The thing to do is repair stuff rather than throw it out. If its beyond repair, then either get something second-hand, or by all means, get a nice shiny new "A" rated whatever-it-is. But no sneaky jamming a fork in your toaster accidently on purpose so that you can replace it. ("I don't know what happened darling, the fork just fell out of my hand and lodged itself, twisting across several resistors and irreparably damaging the pop-up mechanism. We'll simply have to rush out and get a new one.")
Also, at present the rating system applies to white goods only, but there are criterion that you can apply to other household items in terms of energy efficiency, such as whether or not you can switch them off from stand-by mode etc.,
Happy hunting.
