Generally, I'm not very materialistic - although I do covet two things - bikes and apple macs. When I first got into bikes I couldn't understand why some people had more than one. Now I've got my commuting bike, and my mountain bike, I'd quite fancy a tourer, and a tandem and...
I first got into macs four or five years ago. Now, like most mac converts, I'd never go near a PC again. My mac laptop has been dropped a few times and is a bit more grey than white now. It's a bit temperamental but works after a fashion. The main problem was that I couldn't connect to the internet as the software had crashed.
I've been toying with buying a new one for a while. Some vague green-ness, alongside a slightly scary dip in paid work (maybe I'm one of those social entrepreneurs suffering in the economic downturn) has kept me from shelling out £700. But yesterday I was close to giving in.
Then I got my monthly email from Do The Green Thing - an online initiative which, as you'd expect, encourages you to do green things. It's one of those Web 2.0 sites and after a slightly up-its-own-backside start it has proved quite entertaining.
It encourages you to do one green thing a month. This month's thing is to Stick With What You've Got. In other words don't buy new stuff. The video they've got is a spoof Apple advert trying to get you to buy one of their impossibly beautiful new laptops. It's genius, and it came at just the right time.
I decided to sit down and try to solve the various little problems I had with my laptop. Two hours later I'd worked out how to get Firefox on it, and hey presto I have a wireless laptop again, which may be a bit knackered, but works perfectly fine most of the time.
OK, so all this proves is that I'm a bit shallow and slightly daft. But it also shows how, as I've mentioned before, we all need incentives to do the right thing. Suddenly Doing The Green Thing made keeping my old laptop appear as cool as buying a new one. I became part of an online community of people trying to do the right thing. It felt good.
Not necessarily shallow Rob. Industry relies to some extent on us all being too busy, too ignorant, too baffled to sort things out. Service sectors are built on our lack of pottering/fixing time. Not good for the world. Not good for us.
Posted by: Sue Talbot | May 10, 2008 at 01:59 AM
That's true Sue - I've just super-glued a picture frame that I could just have easily thrown away - I'm on a roll!
Posted by: Rob Greenland | May 13, 2008 at 11:17 AM