Ask anyone the simple question “How much did your shoes cost?” and you will most certainly receive a simple monetary answer: “Oh, about $35.” Follow that up with the question “And where did those shoes come from?” and you will almost always receive the same answer: a store.
Right. Though, unless that store is constructed by some sort of fantastical, otherworldly magic allowing it to spontaneously produce shoes out of nothing, that response is incomplete.
The real answer is embodied energy: the sum total of the energy necessary to make a product.
Look at your person and everything attached to it — shirt, pants, shoes, cell phone, backpack, glasses, etc. Think about how much all of this cost you. A hundred dollars? A few hundred dollars? Probably a decent bit of money, but nothing too spectacular.
Now focus on one single item, such as your shoes, and think about everything this item has been through: raw materials of cloth, rubber, plastic and nylon; processing in factories requiring labor and electricity; shipping requiring trucks and packaging and fuel; advertising, distribution, storage and retail costs.
Once you’ve done that, move onto another item, and then another, and then everything in your closet and then everything in your room. After you get through all of your material possessions, begin thinking abstractly: How much does it actually cost to send an e-mail? To be on the Internet for an hour? How much does lunch actually cost, after you factor in growing, harvesting, shipping, packaging, cooking and labor? It’s all quite overwhelming.
The truth is, you probably have no idea how to answer a question like “How much did your shoes cost?” if you are expected to trace each element back to its actual location and the energy required to extract and modify it.
How much, then, does a pair of shoes actually cost? Roughly 14 kilowatt hours over the course of its entire lifespan, from raw materials to landfill. This is the same amount of energy it takes to use a laptop computer for 280 hours.
What about a pair of jeans and a T-shirt? Jeans cost 20 kilowatts hours, and a T-shirt costs 14 kilowatt hours. Add in socks at 5 kilowatt hours and underwear at 3 kilowatt hours, and you already total 56 kilowatt hours, or more than 1,000 hours of laptop usage. You are literally wearing converted energy every single day of your life.
The reality of our lifestyles is that the myth of our goods coming “from the store” is simply a mental trick that we play on ourselves to get past the reality of our over-consumption. We like to live in a state of disconnect because we don’t have to experience any consequences, and that seems good enough for us in the short term. But it isn’t good enough for the reality of the world.
The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report states that we will require two Earths’ worth of resources by 2030 in order to sustain our current lifestyles. Combine this with the International Polar Year’s report that the Arctic is experiencing ice loss that is worse than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s official forecast.
Finally, top this off with Dan Miller’s “A Really Inconvenient Truth,” which basically states that the panel’s worst-case scenario concerning global warming is actually far outdated and is now the best possible scenario that we can hope for at this point in time.
If we are ever going to level out from this dive-bomb of material excess that we have been in for the past few decades, we simply must incorporate the concept of embodied energy into our daily lives.
We, modern societies, are consuming the planet at an alarming rate, and it’s time we adopt a realistic world view.
Weiss is a journalism sophomore.
The cost of your shoes
Published: Thursday, November 5, 2009
Updated: Thursday, November 5, 2009
So how much did the ink cost that was used to print this piece? How many photons gave up their energy to project it from my computer screen? How much did Cowardly Liberal's bicycle cost in real terms? How much energy goes into extracting rare earth materials to manufacture batteries for hybrid and electric cars? What is your carbon footprint and why are you asking that question in terms of kilowatt-hours? Where do you come up with a conversion factor for clothing to kilowatt-hours that is even remotely reliable? By the way, this is a real op-ed piece, how did it end up in the Daily Texan?
CL, if you read this, maybe you can help out your ol buddy.