14 ms·

I don't understand why we throw away perfectly working things

76 points by BizarreByte 4y ago

leobg 4y ago
Was just thinking the other day how funny it is that people throw away old radios, but then buy white noise machines to gekommen their babies sleep. You can get plenty of noise from a radio, all the way from white to brown. And music, too.
- wombat-man 4y ago
  wow, I have a clock radio and it never occurred to me to use it that way. good idea.
  - leobg 4y ago
    Thanks. The woman acceptance factor of the idea might be low initially. But that tends to change pretty quickly once the baby is soundly asleep. :)
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Sometimes the electric cost justifies the upgrade.
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    How much electricity must be saved in order to offset the manufacture of one white noise device, including the materials mining for all its components, the manufacture of all those components, the transportation (and packaging) of all those components (separately, each) to the assembly factory, the assembly, the transportation (and packaging) of the device to the warehouse, and then transporting it from the warehouse to the store or delivered (in more packaging) to your house?
    - leobg 4y ago
      There are people who keep a fan running, or the hood in their kitchen. That of course works. But the amount of energy required is probably 100x that of a radio. And the latter has the added benefit that you can adjust the type of noise, as well as the volume.
      - forgotmypw17 4y ago
        I was asking about the comparison of an existing radio (electronic, not electromechanical like a fan) to a brand new device.
        Scoundreller 4y ago
        I usually budget $1/year for each watt used 24/7. So using 2 watts instead of 12 watts will save $10/year, or more likely ~$3/year when only used during sleep periods.
        forgotmypw17 4y ago
        Sorry for the misunderstanding... I was not talking about financial cost, but the overall cost to the biome, along with work expended and materials used.
cpsns 4y ago
Just in case: https://archive.ph/Mj4Uu https://archive.ph/Mj4Uu
xg15 4y ago
Corrolay for techies: ... or why we go out of our way to make users throw away perfectly working things. I still remember the shift from Windows XP to Vista. Many users where absolutely uninterested in updating: They were perfectly fine with the amount of features Windows XP offered, had gotten used to the UI, had set up their system to work well for them, etc. Microsoft had to run a sustained campaign of advocacy, nag-screens, and end of support to bring those users to update.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  XP is too porous to safely use today apart from offline or very narrow usage. If it were hardened and hardware didn't evolve too much then it'd be fine to keep using. Reality is that hardware and the web require a certain amount of change in the OS. And OS vendors cannot afford to support old versions indefinitely.
  - agilob 4y ago
    >And OS vendors cannot afford to support old versions indefinitely. So instead they built Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11?
    - rolenthedeep 4y ago
      Why support one OS indefinitely when you can support five concurrently for a decade each!
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      XP's architecture had to be replaced or it would have held things back. Vista may not have been as ambitious as Longhorn but it was an improvement. Not saying every major release was justified, only that we couldn't have stayed on XP forever. Or at least not without sacrificing some improvements and innovation. Windows 11 though seems entirely arbitrary, especially since TPM requirements appear inconsistent and capricious.
      - 4y ago
caboteria 4y ago
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without!
behringer 4y ago
They took the trouble to put a sign on it. Yes perhaps they should have taken it to a thrift store but it seems they're trying or hoping to have it reused rather than trashed.
- cpsns 4y ago
  It was really only one example and what prompted me to write this. It is the exception in terms of this, definitely not the norm. Anyway I picked it up, tested it out, and donated it, so maybe it'll be useful to someone yet.
orblivion 4y ago
Finding something useful to do with something that almost works is such a drain. I don't have the bandwidth to fix everything that broke in my life. And it seems very hard to funnel these items to the people who do. There are probably not enough such people.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  That sounds like something which could be solved by service of the type often built by those who frequent this site. Instead of tossing that piece of equipment with a small problem it could be either brought to or collected by one of those fixer-types (of whom I'm one) who can fix the object to give it a new life, either by handing it over to a thrift store or a local charity or by thrift-store-selling it themselves. Even that could be arranged through a service of the aforementioned type. Such a service does not lend itself to "monetisation" so it probably takes a more ideologically driven type of developer than usually found in the startup scene. Still, some of those hang around here as well, me being one of them. To make it work there should be some clear guidelines as to what is considered to be worth repairing to avoid turning the service into an literal garbage dump. It would also be good to keep ideology as much out of the public-facing image as possible to avoid it being pigeonholed into the Gretasphere [1] and as such being shunned by many who would otherwise be interested. [1] of the Thunberg type, not the children's book
  - orblivion 4y ago
    Why not monetization? I had a coworker who refurbished old phones and sold them on ebay. If you can make a little money on the repair and resale, maybe the connecting service could take a tiny cut.
    - orblivion 4y ago
      But maybe a simple purpose-built message board would go a long way. You don't just browse craigslist looking for people who post half-broken stuff right?
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
vishnugupta 4y ago
I have a related observation, based on my own behaviour and my experience, which is near extinction of electronic/electrical appliance repair shops where I live. And I wonder if it's related to we getting used to instant gratification. Growing up in India in the 90s, if I discovered a new song in radio/television buying a tape was nearly a month long affair. From that I went to instantaneous access to nearly any song in any language. I'm not complaining, I absolutely love it. However this need for instant gratification is sort of leaking into physical objects, so to speak. So if a physical device malfunctions I want to get it instantly working again which is almost impossible so I reach out for the next best thing which is to buy a replacement. And in the 90s it was totally OK for our home appliances, like TV, mixer/grinder etc., to be taken to repair shops. However, I've seen a gradual decline of such shops. It could also be due to decreasing reliability and repairability.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think decreasing costs of (often overseas) manufacturing, increased costs of always-domestic repair labor, (related to the first) increased costs of spare parts as a percentage of new price, and increased reliability of electronics. I’m a hardcore DIYer and try to repair a lot of things. What I find interesting is how few people even consider repairing something (either DIY or using a shop) and even when I show them how easy/cheap some things are to DIY, they can’t be bothered next time. Repair or wear parts that sell-through a lot are often still quite cheap/cheaper than decades ago. I seem to recall paying $40-60 in 90s money for a set of brake pads in the 90s. They’re often $25-50 in 2020s money now. Yesterday, I ordered 3 sets of pads (F/R for one car, F for the other) which will be delivered to my house for $74 total.
  - benj111 4y ago
    Maybe it's just me but I almost always take apart a failed item. To see if it's fixable, and also to see how it works.
  - jmrm 4y ago
    I also do the same, and I'm happy there are people like us who gives objects a second life :-) The only appliances I had to recycle can't be repaired in any way or it cost about the same of a new one, but I rarely have that situation. Living 15 minutes apart from a appliance scrapyard, where parts are a lot cheaper than new, also improves that.
paulcole 4y ago
> How do we consider this okay? You’d be amazed at what we (as in people) can convince ourselves is OK. Everybody’s guilty of something — especially the people most likely to be reading HN. Eating meat, living in big houses, ordering stuff from around the world, having a bunch of kids, driving a car everywhere, flying in a plane on vacation. We’re all guilty and we all want to think we’re not. “But I recycle…” “But I have to drive…” “But corporations are worse…” “But eating meat is natural…” “But a house with a yard is a better environment for kids to grow up in…” Some or all of these might be true. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re responsible for your actions, whether you can justify them to yourself or not.
- runnerup 4y ago
  > We’re all guilty and we all want to think we’re not. I’ve completely accepted my guilt. I don’t try to convince myself that these things are the right way to live life. I just accept that the only way for me to make a difference is to be part of, or very closely adjacent to, the “ruling class” (politicians, corporate leadership) where I would be able to start taxing externalities and allocate those taxes to remediation. I know my eating meat is wrong and bad for the world. I just don’t believe that individually becoming virtuous will change anything about the world.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    > I know my eating meat is wrong and bad for the world. It's not if you're buying locally-sourced meat. It's better than growing stuff in Africa and shipping it across in refrigerated containers using as much fuel every day as about 20,000 cars would.
    - paulcole 4y ago
      What “stuff” are you talking about? Aren’t most of Africa’s agricultural exports things like cocoa, coffee, tea, tobacco, and cotton?
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
modeless 4y ago
We do it for the same reason nature does. Building new things is far easier than maintaining and modifying old things forever. It's a tremendous waste for old plants and animals and humans to die and throw away all their accumulated resources and experience, but nature tolerates it because maintaining and/or modifying bodies over time eventually just becomes too hard. I can see some objections of the form "that's not why nature does it, it's because genes need to evolve". Well, nature could have had our own genes changing and evolving in our bodies over time, if that made sense. It doesn't. The root of the problem is it's too difficult to repair and modify old things. Much easier to throw away and replace. The difference is that nature recycles everything. But that isn't always constant. There have definitely been times in evolutionary history when places have been full of natural waste of one type or another and it took a while for nature to figure out how to recycle it. One day maybe we can get there too.
standardUser 4y ago
Giving things away is a massive pain in the ass. Have you ever tried to sell things on Craigslist or Facebook? Or even give them away for free? You get all kinds of dolts with all kinds of problems and complicated ideas about when and where to meet, assuming they don't just completely flake. There's haggling and begging and bizarre, sometimes unsettling interactions. As a result, I tend to just trash things more often than not. Buy my current neighborhood does a good job. People leave furniture and other items on the sidewalk regularly and other people take them (oftentimes seemingly instantly!). Half of my furniture is from the street, some of it very nice. And there are Facebook groups where people post stuff that's on the street, or things in their home they want to give away (though then you are back to making plans with weirdos). The main group I use is Buy Nothing... https://www.facebook.com/BuyNothingProject/ https://www.facebook.com/BuyNothingProject/ I find a lot of their policies/moderation to be excessive, but it works.
- tmaly 4y ago
  Giving away free is more trouble than it is worth. You spend so much time responding to people as if you are selling the item for $1000. I just tell them all, I am putting it out by the curb. First person to come gets it.
- benj111 4y ago
  eBay is by far the best for buyers not messing sellers about.
- i_am_jl 4y ago
  >People leave furniture and other items on the sidewalk regularly and other people take them (oftentimes seemingly instantly!). Half of my furniture is from the street, some of it very nice A bit of a tangent, but I was recently shocked to learn that there are places in the US where this is discouraged. I suggested leaving a couch out on the curb when the owner had the same reservations as you about FB/CL and I was told that the cops will come by and spraypaint "BEDBUGS" on any furniture in an attempt to curb the neighborhood/city/regional bedbug problem. I was told that second hand stores are similarly cagey about taking any used furniture, so the options are FB/CL or a dumpster.
TideAd 4y ago
> The cost to our world from this behaviour is immense and it is quite frankly indefensible at this point. This is just neurotic. On what margin is throwing away a microwave destroying the planet? It's not going into the ocean. We're not running out of steel. You have to prioritize things that matter here. Recycling options for appliances are pretty poor everywhere you go. I live in a major city, and there's exactly 1 store for recycling electronics. It's 25-minute drive. I don't know why we don't have the infrastructure, but we don't, and that's what you'll have to solve. Most 20-somethings these days would gladly recycle things if there was an easy way. Telling people to use their annoying/cheap/half-broken appliances forever for vague environmental guilt reasons is just not going to work, I'm sorry.
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  What does being 20-29 years old have to do with the convenience of recycling locations? The article didn't state or imply that this was a problem only for 20-somethings.
- benj111 4y ago
  Why would you need to throw away a microwave less than a year old? This example isn't even a problem of recycling, it's buying something you don't need. How much energy went into that microwave that is now waiting with the rubbish. How many does it take before it's meaningful?
  - maximus-decimus 4y ago
    Maybe it sucks and you decided to buy a good one. Maybe you're redecorating the whole kitchen and want the microwave to match the rest.
    - beebeepka 4y ago
      Horrible reasons for throwing something away. Good reasons to give it away.
ck45 4y ago
This is a quite entertaining YouTube channel dealing with that subject: https://youtube.com/c/ThePostApocalypticInventor https://youtube.com/c/ThePostApocalypticInventor
csours 4y ago
Some ideas to explore here: improvement, marginal improvement, scarcity, marginal scarcity, externalities We buy new shit because it's better than the old shit in some way. If the thing we want to buy is scarce it will cost a lot. At some point, something in the thing may become scarce, but it is not now. Externalities - the cost to put something in household garbage is mostly dependent on volume, not on the value of the item, or if it is recyclable or reusable.
glitchc 4y ago
I often fix things that are fixable, but sometimes I just outgrow the feature set or it becomes too difficult to fix, lacking parts or me lacking tools or time.
TexanFeller 4y ago
Advertising. Many billions are spent manipulating us into believing the perfectly usable things we have are inadequate and only the new and shiny version of it will make us feel whole and/or will attract attention from the opposite sex. Advertising works, hence why many of us SWEs have cushy high paid jobs at tech companies that sell ads.
leobg 4y ago
Somebody should start a business collecting clothes made of wool that are worn out or have holes in it. Send people a prepaid shipping box. They put in their stuff. You clean and mend it at scale. And sell it. Yes, it’s work. But how many holes can a skilled person mend per hour? I think you could earn a programmer’s wage with that kind of labor, or maybe even better.
- spockz 4y ago
  Here in the Netherlands many neighbourhoods have containers for textiles. You can put in any clothes or things like bed linen as long as it is dry and clean and not completely worn. These are picked up, cleaned and mended where necessary, and then, dependent on the area, sold or given away for free to whom need it. It does not pay well and is volunteer work. Edit: there is even a charity that comes and pick up stuff. They are really picky though. A whole perfect couch with just a small stain won’t be accepted because they can’t sell it as is. And they don’t want to risk being stuck with it or unable to clean.
  - leobg 4y ago
    These exist in Germany as well. But I also think they just cherry pick. Plus, you would probably get shamed publicly if you threw in clothes that have a hole in it, no matter the material. They’d take that not as a sign that you care about giving broken things a second life, but rather as an insult.
1over137 4y ago
I've had great experience with using freecycle.org to give working old stuff away.
dale_glass 4y ago
There's lots of reasons why something like a working microwave might get thrown out. Eg: * I have a small kitchen and just never use it * I have a small kitchen and it lacks some feature (eg, grill) that would save me another device. * Grandma can't made head or tails of these weird buttons. Seriously, my current mirowave damn near has hieroglyphs on it, and it's quite recent. Microwave UI is just appalling. Feel free to ask for a picture if curious. * We remodeled the kitchen and it's no longer a good fit * We had an extra one for some reason. Eg, child had to move back in with their parents, brought their stuff. * It's too small * I'm moving to another country and not taking it with me As for why not sell it/list it somewhere? You can buy a microwave for $50, so it may just not be worth the effort. You have to do all this negotiating/chatting/texting and agreeing with people about who will be where when, and if you're not in a bad need of a few bucks it may just not be worthwhile.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  > Seriously, my current mirowave damn near has hieroglyphs on it I bought a Smeg oven. I wanted and oven and wanted one with very few features to avoid complexity. I foolishly bought one with two knobs, as it looked simple. It has heaps of features which you access via twiddling one knob, both together, pushing down on one while twiddling the other, and a variety of other methods which I don’t understand. Setting the clock takes me 10 minutes.
- codalan 4y ago
  I bought a small Toshiba EM925A5A-BS microwave, which was top ranked by The Wirecutter at the time. Two years later, the light begins flickering. Now it just doesn't come on at all. I google up how to replace the lightbulb. Turns out, you can't and this issue is common amongst owners of these microwaves. It's amazing they can't spend the extra dollar or two in components and make the bulb replaceable. I imagine a lot of these Toshiba microwaves are in dumps now. I'd have a hard time trying to give this thing away with a defective light. I'll probably be stuck with it finally stops working altogether, and then it will end up in a landfill.
  - jmrm 4y ago
benj111 4y ago
I picked a nice 1930s sideboard/bed side table and a working lamp out of a skip just yesterday. I've taken things from the tip that just work. Including a KitchenAid mixer. I really don't get why people don't just take this stuff to the charity shop. Skips go for ~£300 and the one yesterday was full of mostly fine stuff. Someone paid good money to get rid of good stuff. I don't get it.
- grok22 4y ago
  What's a "skip"?
  - qull 4y ago
    A small dumpster.
DesiLurker 4y ago
Alternate take, its all just a product of energy and materials extraction being super cheap so money basically becomes a representative of human attention/effort. its very hard to change as the behavior is permeated everywhere. IMO a better approach would be to provide guardrails against poor disposal for non-easily biodegradable stuff like plastics. especially the once we let go in ocean. the big eye-opener for me was when I learned that plastics can take as much as 5000 years to fully decompose. that means the single use bag I use to pickup my food from restaurant will last as much as the entire human civilization in nature for my 10 minute convinience.
0x445442 4y ago
And then there are Amigas.
kappuchino 4y ago
Anecdotal to a certain degree: In our part of Cologne, Germany, you place things you want to share/get rid of outside your doorstep (even in duplexes and larger houses with lots of flats). People come by and take (mostly what needed), nearly zero vandalism. I found a lot of good things others did not need this way: A Coffeemachine, furniture for our living room, two printers and lots of mugs. I guess it works where it works ... and official people have the mentality to tolerate some unrestricted sharing. Also, the city has a web-app to send them a notice of "trash piles" - with tracking if and when the pile has been taken care of. Last, the city run recycling facilities are "free", you just have to drive your stuff to the place or you have a yearly number of times to get it taken from the streets (large objects like couches) for free, too.
lm28469 4y ago
Our whole system revolves around people buying shit they don't need/want to keep up with the ridiculous pace at which we produce shit we don't need/want. I think 3/4th of my kitchen is composed of stuff people threw away, and everything is 100% working. The depressing thing is that the extreme vast majority of people have completely accepted it as the only possibility, as if no other way of life ever existed and will ever exist > The ideology of consumerism acts like a fault in its manufacture, it sabotages the commodity coated in it; it turns what could be the material equipment of happiness into a new form of slavery. > Premature burial is an axiom of consumerism, imperfection a precondition of planned obsolescence Raoul Vaneigem
- cpsns 4y ago
  This is pretty much exactly it and I agree with you 100%. Most of the stuff I own works exactly as it should, but was someone else's junk. I didn't want to call out consumerism too directly or by name, because people tend to take it badly. Even a lot of the comments here are quite defensive and I didn't even get into what I truly think about the situation. There's no way this system is sustainable long term.
thefz 4y ago
Because for capitalism everything must be profited of, everything is disposable, short term gain is better than long term planning, and the earth has infinite resources, there to make the usual 10 people even richer at your expense.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
I have committed to not buying anything new. Almost everything I have, aside from gifts I receive from people who overlook my preference, is second-hand. It is called freeganism, and it helps me feel less complicit in the shaving down of our own biome into things which are thrown away. In a country with massive abundance, there is more than enough secondhand stuff to go around. I wish it to become less acceptable (or more workaroundable) for devices like Apple's to become locked forever just because their owner has locked them. I also have a "hobby" of looking for homes and owners for things which I find. I have found it to be rewarding.
- valleyer 4y ago
  I have bought and sold secondhand Apple devices (Macs and iPhones) many times without problem. What are you basing your comment there on? Yes, as an anti-theft measure, the seller has to explicitly log out of the device before transferring it. Erasing the device prompts you to do this. Apple has many, many faults, but I don't see this as one of them.
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    The problem is that most people do not log out of their device when they discard it. And as long as the device is linked to its iCloud device, it is forever locked and cannot ever be used again.
birdyrooster 4y ago
I don’t know. Maybe that microwave smells really really bad and it’s not coming out. I don’t care how new the damn thing is or how well it works, it’s going in the trash.

76 points by BizarreByte 4y ago

Was just thinking the other day how funny it is that people throw away old radios, but then buy white noise machines to gekommen their babies sleep. You can get plenty of noise from a radio, all the way from white to brown. And music, too.

wombat-man 4y ago
wow, I have a clock radio and it never occurred to me to use it that way. good idea.
- leobg 4y ago
  Thanks. The woman acceptance factor of the idea might be low initially. But that tends to change pretty quickly once the baby is soundly asleep. :)
Scoundreller 4y ago
Sometimes the electric cost justifies the upgrade.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  How much electricity must be saved in order to offset the manufacture of one white noise device, including the materials mining for all its components, the manufacture of all those components, the transportation (and packaging) of all those components (separately, each) to the assembly factory, the assembly, the transportation (and packaging) of the device to the warehouse, and then transporting it from the warehouse to the store or delivered (in more packaging) to your house?
  - leobg 4y ago
    There are people who keep a fan running, or the hood in their kitchen. That of course works. But the amount of energy required is probably 100x that of a radio. And the latter has the added benefit that you can adjust the type of noise, as well as the volume.
    - forgotmypw17 4y ago
      I was asking about the comparison of an existing radio (electronic, not electromechanical like a fan) to a brand new device.
      - Scoundreller 4y ago
        I usually budget $1/year for each watt used 24/7. So using 2 watts instead of 12 watts will save $10/year, or more likely ~$3/year when only used during sleep periods.
        forgotmypw17 4y ago
        Sorry for the misunderstanding... I was not talking about financial cost, but the overall cost to the biome, along with work expended and materials used.

cpsns 4y ago

Just in case: https://archive.ph/Mj4Uu https://archive.ph/Mj4Uu

xg15 4y ago

Corrolay for techies: ... or why we go out of our way to make users throw away perfectly working things. I still remember the shift from Windows XP to Vista. Many users where absolutely uninterested in updating: They were perfectly fine with the amount of features Windows XP offered, had gotten used to the UI, had set up their system to work well for them, etc. Microsoft had to run a sustained campaign of advocacy, nag-screens, and end of support to bring those users to update.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
XP is too porous to safely use today apart from offline or very narrow usage. If it were hardened and hardware didn't evolve too much then it'd be fine to keep using. Reality is that hardware and the web require a certain amount of change in the OS. And OS vendors cannot afford to support old versions indefinitely.
- agilob 4y ago
  >And OS vendors cannot afford to support old versions indefinitely. So instead they built Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11?
  - rolenthedeep 4y ago
    Why support one OS indefinitely when you can support five concurrently for a decade each!
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    XP's architecture had to be replaced or it would have held things back. Vista may not have been as ambitious as Longhorn but it was an improvement. Not saying every major release was justified, only that we couldn't have stayed on XP forever. Or at least not without sacrificing some improvements and innovation. Windows 11 though seems entirely arbitrary, especially since TPM requirements appear inconsistent and capricious.
    - 4y ago

caboteria 4y ago

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without!

behringer 4y ago

They took the trouble to put a sign on it. Yes perhaps they should have taken it to a thrift store but it seems they're trying or hoping to have it reused rather than trashed.

cpsns 4y ago
It was really only one example and what prompted me to write this. It is the exception in terms of this, definitely not the norm. Anyway I picked it up, tested it out, and donated it, so maybe it'll be useful to someone yet.

orblivion 4y ago

Finding something useful to do with something that almost works is such a drain. I don't have the bandwidth to fix everything that broke in my life. And it seems very hard to funnel these items to the people who do. There are probably not enough such people.

the_third_wave 4y ago
That sounds like something which could be solved by service of the type often built by those who frequent this site. Instead of tossing that piece of equipment with a small problem it could be either brought to or collected by one of those fixer-types (of whom I'm one) who can fix the object to give it a new life, either by handing it over to a thrift store or a local charity or by thrift-store-selling it themselves. Even that could be arranged through a service of the aforementioned type. Such a service does not lend itself to "monetisation" so it probably takes a more ideologically driven type of developer than usually found in the startup scene. Still, some of those hang around here as well, me being one of them. To make it work there should be some clear guidelines as to what is considered to be worth repairing to avoid turning the service into an literal garbage dump. It would also be good to keep ideology as much out of the public-facing image as possible to avoid it being pigeonholed into the Gretasphere [1] and as such being shunned by many who would otherwise be interested. [1] of the Thunberg type, not the children's book
- orblivion 4y ago
  Why not monetization? I had a coworker who refurbished old phones and sold them on ebay. If you can make a little money on the repair and resale, maybe the connecting service could take a tiny cut.
  - orblivion 4y ago
    But maybe a simple purpose-built message board would go a long way. You don't just browse craigslist looking for people who post half-broken stuff right?
  - the_third_wave 4y ago

vishnugupta 4y ago

I have a related observation, based on my own behaviour and my experience, which is near extinction of electronic/electrical appliance repair shops where I live. And I wonder if it's related to we getting used to instant gratification. Growing up in India in the 90s, if I discovered a new song in radio/television buying a tape was nearly a month long affair. From that I went to instantaneous access to nearly any song in any language. I'm not complaining, I absolutely love it. However this need for instant gratification is sort of leaking into physical objects, so to speak. So if a physical device malfunctions I want to get it instantly working again which is almost impossible so I reach out for the next best thing which is to buy a replacement. And in the 90s it was totally OK for our home appliances, like TV, mixer/grinder etc., to be taken to repair shops. However, I've seen a gradual decline of such shops. It could also be due to decreasing reliability and repairability.

sokoloff 4y ago
I think decreasing costs of (often overseas) manufacturing, increased costs of always-domestic repair labor, (related to the first) increased costs of spare parts as a percentage of new price, and increased reliability of electronics. I’m a hardcore DIYer and try to repair a lot of things. What I find interesting is how few people even consider repairing something (either DIY or using a shop) and even when I show them how easy/cheap some things are to DIY, they can’t be bothered next time. Repair or wear parts that sell-through a lot are often still quite cheap/cheaper than decades ago. I seem to recall paying $40-60 in 90s money for a set of brake pads in the 90s. They’re often $25-50 in 2020s money now. Yesterday, I ordered 3 sets of pads (F/R for one car, F for the other) which will be delivered to my house for $74 total.
- benj111 4y ago
  Maybe it's just me but I almost always take apart a failed item. To see if it's fixable, and also to see how it works.
- jmrm 4y ago
  I also do the same, and I'm happy there are people like us who gives objects a second life :-) The only appliances I had to recycle can't be repaired in any way or it cost about the same of a new one, but I rarely have that situation. Living 15 minutes apart from a appliance scrapyard, where parts are a lot cheaper than new, also improves that.

paulcole 4y ago

> How do we consider this okay? You’d be amazed at what we (as in people) can convince ourselves is OK. Everybody’s guilty of something — especially the people most likely to be reading HN. Eating meat, living in big houses, ordering stuff from around the world, having a bunch of kids, driving a car everywhere, flying in a plane on vacation. We’re all guilty and we all want to think we’re not. “But I recycle…” “But I have to drive…” “But corporations are worse…” “But eating meat is natural…” “But a house with a yard is a better environment for kids to grow up in…” Some or all of these might be true. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re responsible for your actions, whether you can justify them to yourself or not.

runnerup 4y ago
> We’re all guilty and we all want to think we’re not. I’ve completely accepted my guilt. I don’t try to convince myself that these things are the right way to live life. I just accept that the only way for me to make a difference is to be part of, or very closely adjacent to, the “ruling class” (politicians, corporate leadership) where I would be able to start taxing externalities and allocate those taxes to remediation. I know my eating meat is wrong and bad for the world. I just don’t believe that individually becoming virtuous will change anything about the world.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > I know my eating meat is wrong and bad for the world. It's not if you're buying locally-sourced meat. It's better than growing stuff in Africa and shipping it across in refrigerated containers using as much fuel every day as about 20,000 cars would.
  - paulcole 4y ago
    What “stuff” are you talking about? Aren’t most of Africa’s agricultural exports things like cocoa, coffee, tea, tobacco, and cotton?
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago

modeless 4y ago

We do it for the same reason nature does. Building new things is far easier than maintaining and modifying old things forever. It's a tremendous waste for old plants and animals and humans to die and throw away all their accumulated resources and experience, but nature tolerates it because maintaining and/or modifying bodies over time eventually just becomes too hard. I can see some objections of the form "that's not why nature does it, it's because genes need to evolve". Well, nature could have had our own genes changing and evolving in our bodies over time, if that made sense. It doesn't. The root of the problem is it's too difficult to repair and modify old things. Much easier to throw away and replace. The difference is that nature recycles everything. But that isn't always constant. There have definitely been times in evolutionary history when places have been full of natural waste of one type or another and it took a while for nature to figure out how to recycle it. One day maybe we can get there too.

standardUser 4y ago

Giving things away is a massive pain in the ass. Have you ever tried to sell things on Craigslist or Facebook? Or even give them away for free? You get all kinds of dolts with all kinds of problems and complicated ideas about when and where to meet, assuming they don't just completely flake. There's haggling and begging and bizarre, sometimes unsettling interactions. As a result, I tend to just trash things more often than not. Buy my current neighborhood does a good job. People leave furniture and other items on the sidewalk regularly and other people take them (oftentimes seemingly instantly!). Half of my furniture is from the street, some of it very nice. And there are Facebook groups where people post stuff that's on the street, or things in their home they want to give away (though then you are back to making plans with weirdos). The main group I use is Buy Nothing... https://www.facebook.com/BuyNothingProject/ https://www.facebook.com/BuyNothingProject/ I find a lot of their policies/moderation to be excessive, but it works.

tmaly 4y ago
Giving away free is more trouble than it is worth. You spend so much time responding to people as if you are selling the item for $1000. I just tell them all, I am putting it out by the curb. First person to come gets it.
benj111 4y ago
eBay is by far the best for buyers not messing sellers about.
i_am_jl 4y ago
>People leave furniture and other items on the sidewalk regularly and other people take them (oftentimes seemingly instantly!). Half of my furniture is from the street, some of it very nice A bit of a tangent, but I was recently shocked to learn that there are places in the US where this is discouraged. I suggested leaving a couch out on the curb when the owner had the same reservations as you about FB/CL and I was told that the cops will come by and spraypaint "BEDBUGS" on any furniture in an attempt to curb the neighborhood/city/regional bedbug problem. I was told that second hand stores are similarly cagey about taking any used furniture, so the options are FB/CL or a dumpster.

TideAd 4y ago

> The cost to our world from this behaviour is immense and it is quite frankly indefensible at this point. This is just neurotic. On what margin is throwing away a microwave destroying the planet? It's not going into the ocean. We're not running out of steel. You have to prioritize things that matter here. Recycling options for appliances are pretty poor everywhere you go. I live in a major city, and there's exactly 1 store for recycling electronics. It's 25-minute drive. I don't know why we don't have the infrastructure, but we don't, and that's what you'll have to solve. Most 20-somethings these days would gladly recycle things if there was an easy way. Telling people to use their annoying/cheap/half-broken appliances forever for vague environmental guilt reasons is just not going to work, I'm sorry.

TaupeRanger 4y ago
What does being 20-29 years old have to do with the convenience of recycling locations? The article didn't state or imply that this was a problem only for 20-somethings.
benj111 4y ago
Why would you need to throw away a microwave less than a year old? This example isn't even a problem of recycling, it's buying something you don't need. How much energy went into that microwave that is now waiting with the rubbish. How many does it take before it's meaningful?
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  Maybe it sucks and you decided to buy a good one. Maybe you're redecorating the whole kitchen and want the microwave to match the rest.
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    Horrible reasons for throwing something away. Good reasons to give it away.

ck45 4y ago

This is a quite entertaining YouTube channel dealing with that subject: https://youtube.com/c/ThePostApocalypticInventor https://youtube.com/c/ThePostApocalypticInventor

csours 4y ago

Some ideas to explore here: improvement, marginal improvement, scarcity, marginal scarcity, externalities We buy new shit because it's better than the old shit in some way. If the thing we want to buy is scarce it will cost a lot. At some point, something in the thing may become scarce, but it is not now. Externalities - the cost to put something in household garbage is mostly dependent on volume, not on the value of the item, or if it is recyclable or reusable.

glitchc 4y ago

I often fix things that are fixable, but sometimes I just outgrow the feature set or it becomes too difficult to fix, lacking parts or me lacking tools or time.

TexanFeller 4y ago

Advertising. Many billions are spent manipulating us into believing the perfectly usable things we have are inadequate and only the new and shiny version of it will make us feel whole and/or will attract attention from the opposite sex. Advertising works, hence why many of us SWEs have cushy high paid jobs at tech companies that sell ads.

leobg 4y ago

Somebody should start a business collecting clothes made of wool that are worn out or have holes in it. Send people a prepaid shipping box. They put in their stuff. You clean and mend it at scale. And sell it. Yes, it’s work. But how many holes can a skilled person mend per hour? I think you could earn a programmer’s wage with that kind of labor, or maybe even better.

spockz 4y ago
Here in the Netherlands many neighbourhoods have containers for textiles. You can put in any clothes or things like bed linen as long as it is dry and clean and not completely worn. These are picked up, cleaned and mended where necessary, and then, dependent on the area, sold or given away for free to whom need it. It does not pay well and is volunteer work. Edit: there is even a charity that comes and pick up stuff. They are really picky though. A whole perfect couch with just a small stain won’t be accepted because they can’t sell it as is. And they don’t want to risk being stuck with it or unable to clean.
- leobg 4y ago
  These exist in Germany as well. But I also think they just cherry pick. Plus, you would probably get shamed publicly if you threw in clothes that have a hole in it, no matter the material. They’d take that not as a sign that you care about giving broken things a second life, but rather as an insult.

1over137 4y ago

I've had great experience with using freecycle.org to give working old stuff away.

dale_glass 4y ago

There's lots of reasons why something like a working microwave might get thrown out. Eg: * I have a small kitchen and just never use it * I have a small kitchen and it lacks some feature (eg, grill) that would save me another device. * Grandma can't made head or tails of these weird buttons. Seriously, my current mirowave damn near has hieroglyphs on it, and it's quite recent. Microwave UI is just appalling. Feel free to ask for a picture if curious. * We remodeled the kitchen and it's no longer a good fit * We had an extra one for some reason. Eg, child had to move back in with their parents, brought their stuff. * It's too small * I'm moving to another country and not taking it with me As for why not sell it/list it somewhere? You can buy a microwave for $50, so it may just not be worth the effort. You have to do all this negotiating/chatting/texting and agreeing with people about who will be where when, and if you're not in a bad need of a few bucks it may just not be worthwhile.

lostlogin 4y ago
> Seriously, my current mirowave damn near has hieroglyphs on it I bought a Smeg oven. I wanted and oven and wanted one with very few features to avoid complexity. I foolishly bought one with two knobs, as it looked simple. It has heaps of features which you access via twiddling one knob, both together, pushing down on one while twiddling the other, and a variety of other methods which I don’t understand. Setting the clock takes me 10 minutes.
codalan 4y ago
I bought a small Toshiba EM925A5A-BS microwave, which was top ranked by The Wirecutter at the time. Two years later, the light begins flickering. Now it just doesn't come on at all. I google up how to replace the lightbulb. Turns out, you can't and this issue is common amongst owners of these microwaves. It's amazing they can't spend the extra dollar or two in components and make the bulb replaceable. I imagine a lot of these Toshiba microwaves are in dumps now. I'd have a hard time trying to give this thing away with a defective light. I'll probably be stuck with it finally stops working altogether, and then it will end up in a landfill.
- jmrm 4y ago

benj111 4y ago

I picked a nice 1930s sideboard/bed side table and a working lamp out of a skip just yesterday. I've taken things from the tip that just work. Including a KitchenAid mixer. I really don't get why people don't just take this stuff to the charity shop. Skips go for ~£300 and the one yesterday was full of mostly fine stuff. Someone paid good money to get rid of good stuff. I don't get it.

grok22 4y ago
What's a "skip"?
- qull 4y ago
  A small dumpster.

DesiLurker 4y ago

Alternate take, its all just a product of energy and materials extraction being super cheap so money basically becomes a representative of human attention/effort. its very hard to change as the behavior is permeated everywhere. IMO a better approach would be to provide guardrails against poor disposal for non-easily biodegradable stuff like plastics. especially the once we let go in ocean. the big eye-opener for me was when I learned that plastics can take as much as 5000 years to fully decompose. that means the single use bag I use to pickup my food from restaurant will last as much as the entire human civilization in nature for my 10 minute convinience.

0x445442 4y ago

And then there are Amigas.

kappuchino 4y ago

Anecdotal to a certain degree: In our part of Cologne, Germany, you place things you want to share/get rid of outside your doorstep (even in duplexes and larger houses with lots of flats). People come by and take (mostly what needed), nearly zero vandalism. I found a lot of good things others did not need this way: A Coffeemachine, furniture for our living room, two printers and lots of mugs. I guess it works where it works ... and official people have the mentality to tolerate some unrestricted sharing. Also, the city has a web-app to send them a notice of "trash piles" - with tracking if and when the pile has been taken care of. Last, the city run recycling facilities are "free", you just have to drive your stuff to the place or you have a yearly number of times to get it taken from the streets (large objects like couches) for free, too.

lm28469 4y ago

Our whole system revolves around people buying shit they don't need/want to keep up with the ridiculous pace at which we produce shit we don't need/want. I think 3/4th of my kitchen is composed of stuff people threw away, and everything is 100% working. The depressing thing is that the extreme vast majority of people have completely accepted it as the only possibility, as if no other way of life ever existed and will ever exist > The ideology of consumerism acts like a fault in its manufacture, it sabotages the commodity coated in it; it turns what could be the material equipment of happiness into a new form of slavery. > Premature burial is an axiom of consumerism, imperfection a precondition of planned obsolescence Raoul Vaneigem

cpsns 4y ago
This is pretty much exactly it and I agree with you 100%. Most of the stuff I own works exactly as it should, but was someone else's junk. I didn't want to call out consumerism too directly or by name, because people tend to take it badly. Even a lot of the comments here are quite defensive and I didn't even get into what I truly think about the situation. There's no way this system is sustainable long term.

thefz 4y ago

Because for capitalism everything must be profited of, everything is disposable, short term gain is better than long term planning, and the earth has infinite resources, there to make the usual 10 people even richer at your expense.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

I have committed to not buying anything new. Almost everything I have, aside from gifts I receive from people who overlook my preference, is second-hand. It is called freeganism, and it helps me feel less complicit in the shaving down of our own biome into things which are thrown away. In a country with massive abundance, there is more than enough secondhand stuff to go around. I wish it to become less acceptable (or more workaroundable) for devices like Apple's to become locked forever just because their owner has locked them. I also have a "hobby" of looking for homes and owners for things which I find. I have found it to be rewarding.

valleyer 4y ago
I have bought and sold secondhand Apple devices (Macs and iPhones) many times without problem. What are you basing your comment there on? Yes, as an anti-theft measure, the seller has to explicitly log out of the device before transferring it. Erasing the device prompts you to do this. Apple has many, many faults, but I don't see this as one of them.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  The problem is that most people do not log out of their device when they discard it. And as long as the device is linked to its iCloud device, it is forever locked and cannot ever be used again.

birdyrooster 4y ago

I don’t know. Maybe that microwave smells really really bad and it’s not coming out. I don’t care how new the damn thing is or how well it works, it’s going in the trash.