You are absolutely wrong, and this is why landfills have a problem with working electronics being thrown into them.
People who don't know accounting think like this and unnecesarily parrot this failed logic. The 'power problem' is an opEx problem, not capEx. If your capEx is factored in, then it is why secondhand servers are even a thing--else everyone would 'need' the newest most efficient thing because 'power costs money'. This is exactly why data centers move to newer equipment regularly--because their biggest expense
is power. This isn't the case in homelabbing because we don't have multiple 42Us powered 24x7. For comparison in a residential environment, your oven and AC unit uses more power than almost any server.
Here's an example so it's easy to understand. This server lets say is $0 (Server A), and power is $20/more than something newer that costs $400 to buy and then therefore uses $20 less power (Server B). If you're homelabbing and not running a 24x7 data center, you're not leaving stuff powered on 24x7 like this unless power is cheap/free. But let's say you are just to make the example easy:
Code:
One Year Operational Proforma
Server A CapEx: $0
Server A OpEx: Z*12+$20*12 = 12Z +$240
Server A Total: 12Z +$240
Server B CapEx: $400
Server B OpEx: Z*12 = 12Z
Server B Total: $400+12Z
Server A costs $160
less. And furthermore it takes operating Server A
24x7 for 20 months for it to get to the same cost as Server B. If you're not running 24x7, Server A will be cheaper
for over 2 years.
And guess what? In those two years another newer $400 server will come around that makes power 'less'. Or another 'free' server comes around and you get another 2 years. So not only is used gear useful because it's cheaper, but because it doesn't create more waste. It is not ewaste by any proper definition.
The counter argument to this is usually--"but Server A can't do everything Server B can do because Server A old". Yes, this can be true, and when one has outgrown a Server A, it will be given away for free to someone else, and be replaced with a Server B. And that still leaves Server A to continue to provide value to someone, somewhere versus causing industrial pollution.
If the definition of ewaste was actually "defined around the cost of putting and keeping the item in service against the capabilities it provides," then all our homelab servers and equipment are ewaste--
all of it. Why? Because it would have meant for the data centers that originally owned them, "the cost of putting and keeping the item in service against the capabilities it provides" would have defined them as ewaste. This would make the definition of ewaste dependent on perspective, and hard definitions don't work like that. Ewaste is literally electronics that are no longer functioning and beyond repair that need to enter a waste recovery cycle--not an ever changing spectrum of a definition based on perspective.
