News Consumers ignoring 'green' products

A new survey published by consumer electronics site Retrevo shows that purchasers are routinely ignoring eco-friendly hardware.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/02/26/consumers-ignoring-green-products/1

 

i buy an item to do the job i want it to, if its green and does the job it gets a look in, if its green, and doesn't do the job, then sorry not suitable(green harddrives are an example of that which is unsuitable for my needs)

green harddrives are noticably slower( not that i have ever seen a green harddrive, most are black and silver )

 

No. Because I don't believe "Green" gadgets are anything more then just a marketing scheme. Green HDDs for instance. Green is their marketing scheme to get away with having a slow HDD. No, I don't care if it uses 4w instead of 5w.

Not that I'm opposed to the idea of using less power. Things like using a 15w fluorescent light bulb as opposed to a 60w Incandescent bulb. That's what I call green.

 

Except that fluorescent light is - even with recent advances which, I concede, have marginally improved things - hideous. Fine for lighting your garage, fine for offices, nasty in your home. Until we can have effective, affordable LED lighting, I'm sticking with beautiful hot-burning halogen spots.

 

When it comes to computers, I want high performing parts. If they made an eco-friendly part that outperformed 'normal' parts then I'd buy it. As it is, I'm quite happy to burn through more oil/coal for the sake of a higher overclock and FPS.

 

By the time a 'green' gadget pays off you'll have replaced it several time.

 

Also, I'm not completely devoid of environmental conscience. I use public transport or walk far more than I use my car (which is a diesel VW Golf that returns 55mpg, i.e. better than so called eco-friendly hybrids, full of heavy batteries that are environmentally disastrous to produce), I'm conscientious about turning things off when not in use, and - all other factors being equal - I'll choose a greener option over one that is less green, but it is ***WAY*** down my list of priorities, behind price, functionality, performance, ergonomics, reliability, aesthetics, availability and brand (not necessarily in that order). I suspect many on this forum are likeminded.

 

Absolutely - it's a question of priorities, right? I'm sure you don't go around leaving your heating on all day and night or leaving the lights on while you go on holiday, just for the sake of it, but if we let ourselves be ruled by ruthless pursuit of ecological puritanism we'd have no fun at all. In fact, we'd still be living in caves eating raw meat because building a fire to cook it would release evil CO2.

 

I don't bother growing green, cause green products cause ridiculously high.

 

when i built my home server at the end of last year i wanted a very powerful comp that used little power my drives are all green drives as i didnt need the extra 20MB/s read rate or the 3ms less seek time therefore Large green drives where perfect.
my mother board whilst still a p55 had the lowest power requirements of those reviewed all this has reduced the power to about 95W

but at the same time if i build a Gaming pc i will buy the products that match performance and cost so a 5850 / i7 regardless of the power requirements

 

yeap green drives are perfect for home servers, but not a gaming/video editing machine

 

Most of the cost in enviromental terms comes from the materials used to build the item than the power it uses so that a small decrease power usage means almost nothing. For example of large supposedly green items not being worth it the Prius with its batteries costs far more enviromentally to make than 10 years of using petrol will do in damage at the cost of crap performance and a good diesel efficiency like those on polo blue motions etc have far higher mpg than the prius and actually move.

 

This is not true for all green products.

I work for a marine lighting company and we are on average 90% more efficient than the replacement technology, have a better quality of light, last an enormous 50'000 hours, and puts out more light.

Shame we are moving from small scale to mass production pretty soon otherwise i would hit you guys up, we are moving to reduce unit cost in the next 4-5 months so mebbe then.

 

There are some things that I care about being green, (Read as "things that save me money") like cars,light bulbs etc. But when it comes to computer hardware I just don't care. It's all about the right balance between price and performance.

 

Spot on!

 

Unless it's an HTPC, people simply aren't going to care about "green" computer products. Computers are a market that is almost solely based upon maximum performance for your money and to a smaller extent maximum performance. People use computers to compete with each other. Either as individuals or in business. "Green" products simply don't have a good place in computing. It's nice when something can be made more powerful AND more efficient, but as long as you have people competing with each other, the emphasis will always be on more powerful.

I gotta tell ya, I converted my entire house over to these pieces of junk and I have hated them ever since. 1: Their actual lifespan is completely random and never the 5+ years stated on the boxes. 2: They start out bright and nice, but then dim over time and eventually take up to two minutes to actually put out a remotely reasonable amount of light. 3: The color of the light is never the same between any company that produces them. 4: They rarely fit in any light fixtures other than large standard ones (even the smaller models which produce less light often have problems fitting into most light fixtures). And 5: They're filled with mercury and have to be disposed of in a very specific way. Good God, my neighbor dropped one in his garrage and poison control had him evacuate his family from his house for 3 hours while a hazmat team came out to clean and check the entire place. These things are completely worthless and I will never go back to them. once they get some cheaper LED light bulbs, I will be all over it, but until then, I'll sink my money into large appliances that actually make a difference. My high efficiency fridge, washer and dish washer all make a heck of a lot more difference than these anyway. My next upgrade is going to be to a tankless water heating system with PoU electric heaters (our power plant is more efficient at producing the power to heat water electrically than to use PoU gas water heaters, yes, I did the math). These are the things you should be saving for if you want to save energy to save money/trees/mother earth/Al Gore's pride/Unicorns, what have you.

 

even though i have great concern for "human impact" and try to minimise as much waste as i can whether physical or economical, i really hate this green marketing ethos. Unless you use a wooden spoon made from coppiced trees, no gadget is green. Everything takes resources, uses resources and then gets dumped, so a green drive that saves 5w is utter idiocy.
By all means be more efficient, but base your marketing on that claim and not that you are green....
I`m all for reducing my impact on this earth both in consumption and financially, and therefore reward companies that drive toward this efficicency, but fully realise that unless i make a positive contribution to the human condition, me or my family are just going to be a drain until we shuffle off....!

 

instead we buy a "green" labeled computerproduct that is a power hog -20%, but still filled with deadly chemicals, (sometimes even worse than the item it's supposed to replace because it's more complicated because it's "green").

(don't get me started on lightbulbs, I've got a shed where the light is on for 1 hour a YEAR and I'm forced to buy a bulb thats 10x more expensive, doesn't reach full light 'till i've left the shed AND contains electronics and mercury, instead of glass, tin and tungsten.)

 

The only "green" thing I've bought were the 5900 RPM hard drives, and those only because I wanted quiet and cool hard drives for NAS. I DO value power consumption and am somewhat green, but I just think me buying green gadgets isn't going to do anything. For starters the way I use the gadgets/anything has much greater impact than paying for the green label. IMO, not based on facts. Anyway I can buy a normal phone and unplug the charger when not needed, or I can buy the green phone and leave the charger on 24/7. Or I can just forget about it all and not go to sauna today

EDIT: oh this was just about power consumption, not about the use of toxic materials etc, which I can't really tolerate. Then again, I recycle my **** responsibly, so it ain't a huge issue either.

 

So only a quarter of respondents are dimwits then ? Good to see humanity still has some small measure of hope.