Are replacement windows the Environmentally Responsible Choice?

What about the replacement window hype of being the "Environmentally Responsible Choice"? Going green is about more than just energy performance. To determine real environmental impacts, one must take into account the embodied energy of the new and existing windows, the environmental impacts of manufacturing new products, and the expected lifecycle of the product. Embodied energy includes the energy required to extract the raw materials, transport them, make them into a new product, ship the product, and install it. Existing historic windows have all of this energy embodied in them. Tearing out historic windows for replacement units not only wastes embodied energy, it requires additional energy to remove and dispose them. This is on top of the energy required to create and install the new windows.

Statistically, it is virtually impossible to recoup, in energy savings, the amount of money spent on replacing your old BiltBest wood windows with new windows before the new windows need to be replaced. The average person in the United States stays in the same house for about seven years. When it takes upwards of 40-50 years to recover in energy savings what was spent to replace the windows, the expense will never be recouped. Other studies have found that it can take as much as 222 years to recoup in energy savings

what was spent on installing the replacement windows. Furthermore, the typical replacement window often fails within about 20 years. So, in the time it would take to recoup the original replacement windows, statistically, the replacement windows will already have had to be replaced at least once.