What does something cost? In the biggest, most abstract sense.

You buy a bicycle. What are you buying? Not just a bike.

The market price includes an element for all the myriad components included. The metals, rubber and paint. The innovation which went into creating those metals and rubber and paint, and the bike’s design.

The cost of transporting that bike to the showroom where you bought it (oh, and you also have the cost of getting it home).

The cost of all the marketing. The cost of the showroom and its electricity powering the cash register. The cost of the labour of everyone involved.

And so on. Only a market can make that happen smoothly.

What environmentalists are also arguing is that in addition to those immediate and more or less direct costs are the later costs to humankind as a whole associated with getting rid of the bike once its life’s work is done. Surely it is better to make the bike’s many parts re-useable, so that Nature is a tiny bit less depleted when new products are made?

Well, yes. But if one dumps the old bike in a forest or a municipal tip it sooner or later will be consumed and re-used by Nature anyway, even if that takes thousands or millions of years.

And what if recycling waste products is more expensive in cash terms than just dumping them and making new ones? How to factor in longer-term environmental ‘costs’ borne by our children and theirs eg in the global warming drama? (Note: not apparently a weighty consideration when we are embarking on a stunning spending binge to create a Bigger State.)

One way to go is to make products which have the opposite of built-in obsolescence – products which are engineered not only to work superbly but also to last a long time, and so save resources that way.

But they will tend to be more expensive. Better quality materials and build, more sophisticated engineering.

What I sit on write this blog is an old wooden ‘captain’s chair’ I bought in South Africa years ago. Rather nice looking. An antique of sorts, made from all natural materials, which has lasted for some decades and is still going strong.

But not very comfortable. Not at all.

Take instead the Aeron chair as made by Herman Miller.  

It looks like a cross between a fancy cappuccino machine and something from a Dan Dare spaceship.

But because it is so efficient and elegant, not only does it sell well at its full (and significant) price, a market in second-hand Aeron chairs has appeared.

And it is manufactured with so-called Cradle-to-Cradle environmental principles in mind – an eye on the environmental impact at each stage of the process and for the product over its lifetime.

So as usual you get what you pay for.

But it’s maybe a wise move now and again to invest in something strong and good.

Because in paying that higher price you are capturing not only the costs of the article itself today, but also the longer-term total costs as we (at this stage) can hope to measure them?

An Aeron chair which saves the planet (a bit) is good.

A chair which saves one’s buttocks is even better.