Re: Burning old TVs to survive: The toxic trade in electrical waste

Roger Hayter <roger@hayter.org> wrote:

This is wildly untrue. What makes things "throw away" is that we can make them
so cheaply that the labour to repair them is too expensive for it to be
economic. But modern electronic goods are orders of magnitude more reliable
than the consumer electronic goods of yesteryear, so the problem is *not* the
quality of the goods.
 
What needs investing in the safe recycling of electronic parts, and I would
suggest that both consumers and manufacturers should be responsible for this.
 

Demand for new items increases with income. After a while environmental
responsibility develops. Decoupling that, i.e. shifting labor and financial
returns firmly away from production, has not been seen yet.

Is my belief many product categories have seen enough production to last
for generations. Unfortunately I don’t see any will to plan and execute a
seismic shift in economies which could, even so briefly, pause current
capital accumulation streams.