Throwing it all away [Electronics]

The consumer electronics business is now a huge industry and it has a big environmental bill to go with it. If you were to take a look around your home, which bits of electrical equipment do you think would be responsible for keeping the meter under the stairs spinning around like a fruit machine, but never paying out? The kettle. The cooker. The fridge and the freezer. And don't forget the washing machine. Thanks to their heating elements and motors, these are all machines that can chew through the Watts. But are they really using up all your energy at home? But, in the last 20 years, consumer gadgets from TVs to hairdryers have gradually overtaken the obvious candidates for energy usage. Heating and air-conditioning, particularly if you live in the US, remain the largest consumers of energy in the home. But the category that energy analyst firm Tiax refers to as "miscellaneous electronics devices" (MELs) has seen its share of electricity consumption climb to 24 per cent of domestic demand -a total of 298TWh -or 16 per cent of primary energy, which takes into account heating, among other things. Tiax investigators Kurt Roth and Kurtis McKenney concluded in a June 2008 paper in the journal of US air-conditioning organisation ASHRAE: MELs account for a larger portion of residential electricity consumption than any other end use and the second largest portion of residential primary energy consumption (about half of space heating)". As the MEL category includes devices such as toasters, microwave ovens and hair dryers, you might expect a lot of the electricity consumption to be down to their different types of heating elements and motors. But their consumption is easily matched by devices you might not consider to be big drains on electricity. In a report prepared for the Consumer Electronics Association, Roth and McKenney claimed the biggest single electricity consumers in the US were TVs and desktop PCs, with cable and satellite set-top boxes not far behind. Living-room gadgets, from audio players to TVs, accounted for 147TWh of electricity demand in 2006 in the US.