Hi John,
This is a totally fair question and I can see why it feels so counter-intuative.
We totally agree that powered items’ weights are really important for waste minimisation (and generally more so than unpowered items). In fact, the system originally only recorded powered items.
The reason we don’t ask for weights for powered items is that the system automatically estimates the weight of each (repaired) powered item based on its category; i.e. it’s built-in. This is also how we estimate the CO2e prevented by each repair.
A couple of years ago, we added support for unpowered items, but didn’t initially have the reference data to automatically estimate weights. So, we added a ‘weight’ field for unpowered items that people could use to update their impact stats manually. We’ve since added reference weights for unpowered items too, but the weight field has remained, so people can use that to override the default value if needed.
We are considering adding a weight field to powered items too, allowing people to override the default weights for powered items. But we’ve found that not many groups record weights themselves so demand for this feature is fairly low, which means it’s not currently high on the list of priorities.
Do let us know if that would be important for you though!
There’s more detail on how we calculate environmental stats here:
Hope that helps!
James