Our “home theater” amplifier died recently, and I had to go buy a new one to replace it. There was nothing to do with the old one but throw it in the trash, from where it will eventually go into a landfill and no doubt delight some archaeologists in another thousand years.
Once upon a time, when a high fidelity amplifier died, we could take it to a nearby radio/TV repair shop and get it fixed and get another ten years of life out of it. I tried to do that with this amplifier. But I find that no one repairs amplifiers anymore, and in fact even e-bay has trouble finding replacement circuit boards. And in fact, if there were a repair shop, the labor and parts cost to troubleshoot it and repair it would exceed the price of a new amplifier (about $200 in this case), which is exactly why such shops no longer exist.
So I threw it out and bought a new one. But before I did that I took the cover off and satisfied my curiosity to see what was inside. What was inside, of course, was a series of circuit boards with innumerable tiny but very sophisticated circuit chips and microprocessors that would have amazed the scientists and engineers of twenty years ago. Yet they were all headed to the trash heap.
We buy all kinds of marvelous gadgets – MP3 players and flat-screen TVs and radios and home computers and IPods and boom-boxes and high tech automobiles with dozens of embedded computers – and five or ten years later when they quite working we just throw them away. I understand the economics of this, but somehow it just doesn’t seem right. Can a society survive for eons if it throws away as much as we throw away?
Posts
