Gadget craving

Having to buy a new hard-drive, since my old one no longer spins its rounds, I got lost in the enormous variety of speeds, sizes and other specifications. It made me realize it sometimes just takes a day from must-have to has-been. Buying gadgets is great from an economic perspective and it gives an excellent thrill to hold your new toy, but what does it mean to our environment?

I’m talking about our hunger for whatever is new, shiny, fast or trendy. Whether it’s that extra inch, the additional megapixel, the extended memory or that telephone with new features. It’s what I call gadget craving. We long for goodies, sometimes with no other need then just to own them and identify with.

Do we ever realize what kind of waist we produce with all our devices? They contain heavy metals, high-end plastics and nasty chemicals. We still don’t succeed in real recycling, most goodies end up on our landfills.

Now that I’m all excited about my replacement, I’m afraid my old one will end up there as well.

Carbon footprint

With every tsunami, mudslide or hurricane we are confronted with our daily changing environment. To make people aware of their own role in these changes we introduced the carbon footprint years ago. Your personal footprint shows the contribution of your daily actions, whether that is travel, or eating meat, on the production of CO2.

I guess we all realize that keeping the internet up and running costs electricity, and that producing electricity also produces CO2, but do we have a clue how much? What for instance is the impact of this post to this blogs footprint? Time for help, time for tools.

CO2Stats lets you track the carbon dioxide emissions of your website, blog or individual posting. This services calculates the carbon footprint of your web activities, based on the amount of traffic.

There is a pro version with detailed overviews and a fairly simple widget as shown here.

I decided to just use a screenshot; otherwise I could really see how many of you read this blog and help me to enlarge my footprint.