When was the last time a broken DVD player lead to a trip to the repair shop? If you can even find a repair shop near you, the odds are good the cost to fix your DVD player will be more than the price of a new one. The reality is we don't fix electronics anymore, we replace them.
Post-Xmas is when most old gear gets tossed, feeding what experts call a growing throw-away electronics culture. While tech company's benefit from shorter products lifecycles by encouraging the sale of replacement gear, the byproduct can be harmful to household budgets and the planet.
Barbara Kyle, national coordinator for the Electronics TakeBack Coalition in San Francisco, says the drive for smaller thinner products with increasingly harder to replace components, is partly to blame. But also, companies making delicate electronics with short warranty periods are pushing people to trash their digital gear, not fix it.
?It?s almost always cheaper to buy a new printer than to fix the old one, if you can even find a place to make the repairs,? Kyle says. The end result is electronics - that contain toxic substances, including lead, nickel, cadmium, mercury, brominated ?ame retardants - ending up in landfills around the world. The environmental group called E-Stewards estimates only 11 to 14 percent of e-waste is sent to recyclers ? the rest ends up in landfills or is burned resulting in soil, water, and air pollution.
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