i have noticed on a lot of home remodeling shows, diy, hgt etc. that a lot of people are saying things like, we want a green house, we care about the environment, we want a smaller carbon foot print and every other green key phrase you can think of. so they buy environmentally friendly products……like bamboo flooring, ecofriendy cabinets and counter tops, enviro tiles etc…..but they rip out the old and throw it in the trash, where it is carted off to a landfill….wouldn’t the better option be to refinish existing floors instead of replacing them? rehabbing existing cabinet by putting on a new finish and new hardware, and things like that? how does replacing something that is already there, with something else lower your carbon foot print? the bamboo still had to be cut down, it still had to take a large amount of energy to cut them to size, they still had to have tons of chemicals applied to them, they still had to be shipped thousands of miles, and the old still ended up in a trash heap. if you replace something that is not consuming energy with something that is considered environmentally friendly, then aren’t you still increasing your carbon footprint? i mean you should upgrade your old appliances to efficient appliances, but recycle the old instead of throw them away. but appliances consume energy, so by replacing them with efficient models, you would lower your energy consumption, but floors and cabinets do not use energy.
green remodeling…isnt it worse for the environment?
January 24th, 2010 by My Efficient Planet Leave a reply »
Advertisement
You’ve found the discrepancy in the green movement. Enviros love the idea of windmills, but think of the energy and foot print to make all of those. Same with the “great” lightbulbs. Bring mercury into your house.
ok so you kinda got some of that right,well most companys that put in new eco stuff eather recycle the old stuff or reuse it by crushing it down into say rock for a driveway or for looks outside or just give it away to other people who really need it and most of the eco flooring and things like that use little or no harmful chemicals its called low voc or no voc if i recall right and bamboo is fast growing depending on the type(i know this because i grow it)and look for a channel called planet green its a channel that everything on there like the name says is about green liveing and things like that hope this answers ur question if there is anything else you wanna know just message me
yes the “great” light bulbs bring a small amount of mercury into ur house but look at the tube lights and others they have more of it in them sooo more or less you still have some
Keb, how many batteries have you got in your house? How many have you thrown away in the last year? Batteries have more heavy metals in them than CFL light bulbs have mercury. Just one button battery from your car remote has more toxic waste than a hundred CFL’s. Do you recycle your batteries? Or just landfill them?
The minuscule amount of mercury doesn’t present an environmental problem if they get recycled. It’s when millions of bulbs get thrown into landfills and the cumulative mercury from all those CFL’s would then be a problem.
You’re absolutely right, it’s better to reuse than it is to buy new, except for the appliances.
They could be refinishing floors with a ‘green’ sealant, but most ‘green people’ need to feel like their being green. So they buy Prius’ and bamboo shirts and become consumers of green products rather than truly green.
This all seems to make sense. IF you were going to replace your floor ANYWAY, then a greener model would be better, because all floors have to be cut down and have a certain amount of a carbon footprint. I would like to believe that the old flooring gets recycled on these shows, but you never know.
You’ve definitely hit upon a disturbing discrepancy in the public’s mentality.
Unfortunately, there are many people who like to justify their rampant consumerism by simply purchasing green products. That’s not to say green products are a bad thing, it’s just that they shouldn’t be an end in as themselves. The idea that ripping out perfectly good floor to replace it with something “green” is at best naive and at worst, malicious.
Of course, there are those that actually think about consequences and realize that if it is the case that they have to replace their floor anyways, they might as well choose a green option. That’s when people truly are going green.
I will add, however, that purchasing a more efficient product to replace another product (even if it hasn’t finished its lifespan) is almost always a “good” thing. This is especially true in appliances. Even if your 10 year old fridge hasn’t reached the end of its 25 year lifespan, you’re doing a good thing to buy a new one. The reason being that the increase in fridge efficiency in the past ten years has been so rapid that it offsets even the environmental cost of producing a new fridge.
As to kep’s idea that we shouldn’t build windmills because they take resources to build, that’s just stupid. Yes, we should look at the WHOLE costs of something before we build/purchase it. However, with 2 seconds of thought you will realize that a lot of coal power plants are old and being decommissioned. Replacing them with new windmills is a hell of a lot better than replacing them with new coal plants.