ShoreBank Blog

Greening your digital TV conversion

by Sarah on February 6th, 2009

Buying time might be one of the few “purchases” that does not require me to spend any money. Yet, the government’s decision to delay the digital TV conversion is just postponing a purchase for millions of Americans. And if we need to spend green, it is also nice to save some green. Regardless of whether or not your household is among the Neilson Media Research estimated 6.5 million unprepared, our analog televisions have a sustainable question to ask us as we face our three upgrade decisions: purchase a digital to analog converter box, purchase a digital television, or subscribe to a cable service.

Each one of these digital conversion alternatives consumes varying quantities of energy and resources. Cable service alone cannot decrease that 50 billion kilowatt hours of electricity US televisions consume. Digital televisions and converter boxes increase the quantity of energy required to produce and run those electronic items. However, should you decide to minimize energy and dispose of our analog televisions, consider that only 18% of consumer electronics, including TVs, are collected for recycling despite making up almost 2% of the municipal solid street waste. How can you possibly make the sustainable selection?

Consider the following if you are:

Adding a converter box or a cable service
• Purchase and plug all electronics into a power strip and turn it off when done watching
• Ask your cable service provider about its cable and/or digital-to-analog converter boxes’ energy consumption when deciding upon or renewing a cable service contract.
• Look for a digital-to-analog converter box with an ENERGY STAR label. If all converter boxes met this spec, we could save 823 million kilowatt-hours of energy and $85 million in higher electricity bills.
• Select the “home” mode for brightness. The “retail” mode or “vivid” mode consumes 10-30% more power.

Purchasing a digital television
• Choose a LCD television. In some cases, LCDs can use 50% less energy than their plasma counterpart. A typical 42-inch plasma TV will cost at least $200 more to operate over the life of the product of a similar sized LCD.
• Purchase a smaller TV. Larger TVs use more energy than smaller ones using the same technology. You can save money on the store and on electricity.
• Ask if the retailer or manufacture will recycle your old TV. Best Buy, for example, will charge $10 to recycle any item with a physical screen and give a $10 gift card to each customer that recycles a television.

Disposing your analog television
• Donate. You can list your analog television on www.freecycle.com or on www.craigslist.org to find it a new home.  Another alternative is to give your old TV to a charity organization. However, check whether or not the organization is accepting analog televisions in light of the pending digital transition.
• E-cycle. Investigate the following sites to locate your local e-cycler:
o www.earth911.com
o www.nrc-recycle.org
o www.mygreenelectronics.org

Of course, unless you cease watching television, once we have converted to digital, the next big question is how often to watch our televisions. This transition gives us the opportunity to change our television consumption behavior to create long-term environmental impacts. Let us use this delay to save some green all around.

Statistics Sources:
National Resource Defense Council
Environmental Protection Agency
Federal Communications Commission
ENERGY STAR

Tags: community development, energy efficiency, green banking, recycling tactics, ShoreBank, triple bottom line

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 and is filed under Green Collar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.