As Amanda walked through the park, she noticed a big, new trash and recycling bin called a BigBelly. When she looked it up, she found out it cost $4,000—a lot more than a trash can! The BigBelly has a solar-powered trash crusher inside, so it maximizes the amount of trash it can hold, while minimizing the number of times it needs to be emptied. Traditional trash cans get emptied approximately twice a day, and each BigBelly only needs to be emptied once per week! This lowers the amount of pollution from trucks that drive around to collect garbage.

The BigBelly is one of many “green technologies” that can reduce our impact on the environment. The BigBelly uses a renewable energy source: the sun. Many other renewable technologies are becoming popular. Wind farms in West Texas use wind turbines to produce large amounts of renewable energy. Saint Paul, Minnesota, installed solar powered street lights. Several companies in China, Germany, and the U.S. are developing new solar-powered cars. Some schools now have geothermal heat pumps that use the temperature of the earth to heat and cool buildings. The benefit of renewable energy is that it does not create the kind of pollution that is driving climate change.

Philadelphia has replaced many trash cans with BigBelly stations. The investment ended up saving the city $1 million per year, but the initial cost was high. Buying a lot of BigBellys all at once punches a big hole in any city’s budget! Green technologies can be expensive, especially at first. Unlike BigBelly, investing in green technology does not always save money in the end. For example, a town in the Netherlands built the first solar-powered bicycle path. The solar panels needed to be extradurable for bikes to ride over them, so they were extra expensive. The money spent to build the path could have paid for one hundred times as much power. If more money is invested now, solar roadway technology will likely be cheaper in the future. But it’s hard to know whether it will ever be cheap enough to make solar bike paths worth the cost.

Critics wonder if it is worth investing in such expensive technologies. They argue that we should only spend money on green technology if we are sure it will pay for itself over time. Others think it is worth investing in green technology. They argue that climate change is causing more major weather events that are costly because they destroy people’s homes, so we need to do what we can to reduce climate change.

What do you think? How high a price should we pay for green technology? Should we proceed to invest in new technologies without knowing whether they can or will be used in the future? Or should we conserve public funds for more immediate needs, like improving schools and fixing roads?