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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

You can get a rough estimate based on cost (not perfect but it can be usable) and then own the thing long enough that the energy cost to make drops to negligible. A made in USA toolset from USA sourced materials is unlikely to cost less than the energy needed to make it.

Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.

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> Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.

When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.

I tend to pull lots of materials and appliances out of scrap and trash piles. Do I get to count those as zero?

I think you do, but the point is to have a society where on average we're all under the limit. In such a society we would ideally have stopped throwing away usable items that were energy-intensive to make.

Wouldn't years of function (potentially scaled with remaining effectiveness) he a better proxy where it's calculable?

Price is a good stand-in for it, and it helps encourage "landfill rescue" - buying a shirt at goodwill that would otherwise go into the grinder is better than almost any other option for acquiring a shirt, even if it's a relatively crappy shirt.

Part of the issue with it is that what is "most energy efficient/best for the planet" for a single user may not scale up to what is best for everyone to do.

There's also a problem in that future years of function cannot be estimated well or reliably; the average American kitchen will last 40-60 years, but be remodeled in 10-15 years. Since you cannot control what happens after your house is sold, you are better off using another calculation (or assuming that the purchaser of your house will bulldoze it or something).

Isn’t that already approximated by the purchase price of a used item? There’s some weird transients where a 45-day old car is artificially cheaper (because why would someone sell a 45-day-old car if it wasn’t a lemon?), but that seems to average out pretty quickly.

It might slightly underprice used electronics, but if the alternative destination is a landfill, that slight underpricing seems fine to me.

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