Usage of electric shavers by Braun in 2006 was estimated to have generated about 8,800 metric tonnes of CO2. This is about the same as annually generated by 1,700 cars on the road, absorbed by 970 hectares of forests or generated by 9,200 homes.

What was offered in the report was savings for a new shaver by Braun that was Energy Star certified for using 64% less energy than its past electric shavers. It is not the practice of this website to promote products, even new green products, but the idea to think about energy consumption for shaving was novel enough to blog this statistic.

Conversions of CO2 to trees and other values may not correspond to the values suggested here which this author definitely favours, but did not care to take time to check as this was just a novelty statistic. Values provided in the source also had far too many significant digits to be reliable so they were rounded off here.

What was done to obtain the headline statistic was to take the savings and divide by 0.64 by the author and turned to metric to obtain the total for 2006 when these shavers had not been out. It was not clear how much of the electric shavers market Braun had to be able to calculate a US or North American or global value, only that Braun had declining market shares for several years leading up to 2006, although they are still a strong player on the market, if not the dominant one. The only bad thing about that is declining shares means fewer men might go for this new product, if they do at all. After all, while being green is hip, it’s still hardly considered by men to be “manly”.

If anyone has sales figures for Braun electric shavers and/or market share, please send it along via comments or email in the Suggestions page. It would be interesting to work something out more “globally” for shaving energy statistics.

In the meanwhile, let’s just promote shaving with a razor blade. Thank you. [Envirostats author]

- Energy savings values offered by Industry Week, May 31 2007

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