The simple solution to this is to buy used gear. I avoid sweatshop produced clothing by mostly buying used, and I've recently decided to avoid buying new technology. We've hit a point where a faster computer doesn't make as much of a difference as it used to for many many things. vim doesn't run faster on a i7 MacBook Pro than it does on an four year old MacBook.

Sure the person I buy the used gear from will probably use that money to buy a new system, but the older it is, the less I'm contributing to their purchase.