Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Lighting our civilisation
This is an interesting take on durability – the appropriateness of materials and products for their use.

Most of us have experienced shonky electrical products that seem programmed to self-destruct the moment our warranty is up. Many of us are frustrated that we can’t pick up a bargain 386 PC which can run Word, Excel and enough games to while away an afternoon. Instead we are paying the same price for a PC today that we were 10 years ago. It’s just that the PC is a million times quicker and runs flabby software you simply don’t need.

Durability also impacts on replacement-as-new prices. To cut the boys hair we bought some electric clippers – a bargain at $17. In 12 months of use they became increasingly blunt and eventually unusable.

The dilemma: spend probably twice as much getting the relevant metal parts sharpened (that is, if you can find anyone to actually do it) or spend $17 and get another set, complete with bonus plastic comb, full set of adjustments power cord and transformer.

Society is simply wasting itself away with crappy products unfit for their purpose and energy profligate to the extreme. Being wasteful with our products makes us wasteful with our environment. What makes it more shameful is that we allow our wastefulness to overstep our environment’s carrying capacity.

There are many reasons why we purchase cheap and nasty materials that are poorly put together. They range from the cultural – our obsession allowing the ad-men to tell us what we should buy; economic – our leaders’ obsession with global trade; and political – our indifference vis-à-vis allowing companies and governments to externalise environmental costs of production, thus shielding us from the true cost of our behaviour.

A most illuminating example of our wastefulness is our attitude to light.

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For some reason we need a little LED to assure us an electrical appliance is switched on. But worse, we also need a little LED to tell us when something is not switched on! My house is so full of such wasteful appliances you don’t need to turn on the lights to find your way to the bathroom at night. It is possible to navigate your way from the steady green and red glow emanating from the PC modem, the cordless telephone X 2, the microwave, the cooker, the TV, DVD player, amplifier, speaker system, video player, smoke alarms and mobile phone charger.

Pressures of business profitability persistently drive companies to cut more and more costs by simplifying designs and using ever-cheaper components. Now, most electrical components lack even an ‘off-switch’. Your two choices are ‘on’ and ‘nearly on’, also known as ‘standby’. On standby an appliance can use up to 65% of the energy required to function.

While most of my night lights can be killed at the end of the day by the flicking the switch on the wall, where the switch is hidden behind furniture (the amplifier and laptop), behind the appliance itself (the microwave and the cooker) or causes the need for a system reset (the modem) I am stuck with the glow.

Masses amounts of public money have been lavished on educating the public on energy conservation. We dutifully turn down our boilers a couple of degrees or learn to switch lights off when leaving a room. But all this is pretty much wasted if we continue to stack our homes with more and more electrical junk, complete with LEDs letting us know when it is switched off.

From now on, when replacing an electrical item (just out of warranty, less than two years old) the first question I will ask the sales rep is “Does it have an off-switch?”

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To say that Brisbane has a homeless problem would probably be overstating it. Sure, it’s a problem for those on the streets, but numbers are small and programs are in place alleviating the discomfort.

You see a few regulars on your daily route; a mixed bag of old fellas, indigenous people and those with emotional or mental health problems; the usual vulnerable suspects.

I was unsure of where they headed at night until my cycle ride through Brisbane over the weekend. It seems that most settle underneath the southern end (it gets the evening sun and is somewhat sheltered from any rain) of the William Jolly Bridge. Here, a number of cardboard and tented residencies look like they have been there a while. I am told a soup-van comes down every night to ensure that no one is freezing to death.

Probably 20-30 people bed down here each night. They do so under the glare of enormous floodlights that beam into the night lighting up William Jolly Bridge. How is it that we can find the public money to keep a concrete bridge lit up every night of the year, but cannot find the resources to secure proper shelter for the most vulnerable in society? How ironic that homeless people have found their homes underneath the glare of lighting extravagance.

Our wasteful attitude to light is directly aligned to our wasteful view of energy and ultimately, our regressed view of our place in the environment.

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