Getting custom clothes made in china and shipped frequently is certainly far less environmentally friendly than simply re-using the clothes you already have.
Taking an uber still burns gasoline. A bike would be better.
The average car sits unused (parked) for well over half of its life (I'd say 90%, but I don't feel like research right now, and the concept holds at 50%). If we assume 100 1-hour rides are needed in a day, and each person uses their own vehicle, we need 100 cars, despite the fact that we need 100 car-hours. If we can optimize with a service like Uber, we would only need 5 cars to provide 100 car-hours in a day.
Obviously, trips are not completely fungible, but I think the central concept is clear above.
The second piece is that those 5 cars will be replaced much sooner than the 100 individual cars. That's where the utilization comes in. If everyone drives themselves, then the stock of cars must equal peak demand. If services like Uber combine riders (via UberPool - the typical car has more than 1 passenger seat that is unutilized in the typical commute) and provide utilization for cars at 50% of the day, then the total stock of vehicles would be lower than required for self-driving.
These two effects combine leading to fewer cars.
A washing machine consumes about 100Wh == 360kJ for a load (ref: http://www.rpc.com.au/information/faq/power-consumption/wash...).
The Emma Mearsk, one of the largest container ships around, uses 13 tonnes of fuel an hour to transport 18000 containers, over a distance of (say) 20000 kilometres, which is 1kg of fuel to transport one container 45km (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...), or 450kg for the whole distance.
A 7.5kg washing machine load occupies about 0.00025 of a container, so the fuel requirement to transport that washing machine load is 0.1kg.
The ship's engines use 0.163kg of fuel to generate one kWh, so the energy consumption for just the transport of our washing machine load is 0.6kWh, or 2200kJ.
360kJ of USA residential electricity will cost about $0.015. (Pulled randomly from: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...)
0.16kg of heavy fuel oil in Singapore will cost $0.05. (From: http://shipandbunker.com/prices/apac/sea/sg-sin-singapore#IF...)
This is, of course, horribly simplified --- e.g. I'm not calculating the cost of washing water, or transport from the container port to the owner's house --- it does at least show that big ship shipping is really, really cheap. While I still think the original author is wrong, they are at least plausibly wrong.
But manufacturing new clothes every time you need new clothes? In China, land of the "who cares about the EPA" coal-laden environmental almost-slave-labor disaster?
Built from synthetics (which are Petroleum-derived) ?
To add insult to injury, he talks about injuries / deaths from HEPPA-regulated American Power Plants without giving a damn about the suicide nets placed outside of Chinese Sweatshops that builds his clothes because he's too lazy to wash them.
He seems concerned about highly-paid Energy Workers in the US who are required (by law) to have safe working conditions (or at least, safe as defined by the law. People still die on the job but at least we try to keep them safe).
And then he turns around and brags about using cheap Chinese workers to sew him new clothes every week. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Rana disaster 2013 http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/death-traps-the-bang...
> Between 25% and 50% of the factories in the region restrict access to toilets and drinking water during the workday.
> The same percentage deny workers at least one day off in seven.
> In more than half of Nike's factories, the report said, employees worked more than 60 hours a week. In up to 25%, workers refusing to do overtime were punished.
Gotta keep those margins. You aren't allowed water because that'd cost the company too much.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285980/Revealed-Ins...
> Steel wire meshes have been fitted to windows at Foxconn's factory to stop workers jumping after a rash of suicides believed to be due to harsh management practices
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The worst issue is that Chinese media restricts free speech and labor unions, making it hard to gather statistics of any kind.
In the US, we are required by law to report injuries and accidents on the job. China... not so. And since these injuries are embarrassing to state-owned companies, government censorship exists to cover-up these sorts of accidents a lot. Non-government organizations are subject to crackdowns of course.
When a country doesn't have labor unions fighting for workers rights, these sorts of issues happen.
>> “I work on the plastic molding machine from 6 in the morning to 6 at night,” said Xu Wenquan, a tiny, baby-faced 16-year-old whose hands were covered with blisters. Asked what had happened to his hands, he replied, the machines are “quite hot, so I’ve burned my hands.”
Also, we seem to have killed the US Energy Information and Administration energy prices website. I feel that my day is now fulfilled.
Fixed. Thanks. (Also, why is HN's URL regex matching full stops at the end of URLs?)