The making of a laptop also involves a high material consumption, which includes a wide variety of minerals that may be considered scarce due to different types of constraints: economic, social, geochemical, and geopolitical.

Using the data above, this means that the production of laptops requires a yearly energy consumption of 480 to 868 petajoules, which corresponds to between one quarter and almost half of all solar PV energy produced worldwide in 2018 (2,023 petajoules). Įach year, we purchase between 160 and 200 million laptops. According to the most recent life cycle analysis, it takes 3,010 to 4,340 megajoules of primary energy to make a laptop – this includes mining the materials, manufacturing the machine, and bringing it to market. Not buying new laptops saves a lot of money, but also a lot of resources and environmental destruction. In this article, I explain my motivation for not buying any more new laptops, and how you could do the same. That’s more than 10 times less than the cost of my previous laptops. If my 2006 laptop lasts as long as my other machines – if it runs for another 1.7 years – it will have cost me only 26 euros per year.

Including a new battery and a simple hardware upgrade, I invested less than 150 euros. Instead, I switched to a 2006 second-hand machine that I purchased online for 50 euros and which does everything that I want and need. In 2017, somewhere between getting my office and my website off-the-grid, I decided not to buy any more new laptops. Low-tech Magazine is now written and published on a 2006 ThinkPad X60s. The average useful life of my three laptops was 5.7 years. Between 20, I consumed three laptops that I bought new and which cost me around 5,000 euros in total – roughly 300 euros per year over the entire period.

Being an independent journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I always reasoned that I needed a decent computer and that I need to pay for that quality.

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