As long as they can. I can actually see all 3 of these umbrellas as being repairable, just by different methods, and if I were forced to use any of them, I wou

As long as they can. I can actually see all 3 of these umbrellas as being repairable, just by different methods, and if I were forced to use any of them, I would definitely attempt to keep them working as long as I could. Maybe that's the ultimate lesson here. An example is a coffee lid, sometimes it's active use is less than six seconds, but it's 'actual' life may be over a thousand years. A thousand years of "sleep", during which it may be reused or recycled by those in the future in some as yet unknown way, meanwhile continuing to store the energy that was expended in its production. I like to think of "waste" as things which are merely not currently useful.