new iron

Here's a random one for you - I bought a new iron recently.

I've been rather impressed by it, actually. I had to get a new one because the old one started leaking. Well, I dropped it, so that's hardly surprising, but it was one of those leaks where it was a small dribble, so I kept using it for a while, but in the end I picked one up at Tesco for about £25.

The cost of bog standard electrical equipment is staggering nowadays. It really has become cheaper to buy new things than to get old stuff repaired, which can't be a good thing for the environment.

Especially when (and I don't know for sure with my iron, but I'm assuming) everything is made in China. The quantities of raw materials and then finished products transported around the globe is mind-blowing. All of it done using fossil fuels.

It's one of those extra 'bonus' problems of unrestrained global capitalism. The main one of course being the fact that the workers who put this stuff together in China probably can't actually afford to buy the stuff they make. Especially when it comes to high-end electrical goods.

And of course the fact that part of the way these manufacturers make money is because environmental regulations for pollutants are so lax in China, so they don't have to spend money cleaning up.

Wow - that was a tangent and a half.

All I was really going to talk about is that I've actually found the new iron to be really good. It seems to get hotter and stay hotter than my old one, and it glides over the clothes much more smoothly.

I've no idea if that's because iron technology has advanced, or this is a better model (or, more likely, the features that were on the better models are now routinely available on the cheap ones) or simply that it's newer and therefore not worn out in any way.