Over the past few months I’ve compiled a pretty neat collection of functional home electronics that have been left behind for recycling. Let’s see, a $400.00 set of Bose speakers, several surround sound and guitar amplifiers of various sizes. When I started offering free electronics recycling I never expected we’d see fully functional equipment.
Electronics recyclers usually get the stuff that’s destroyed or utterly useless. We get those things, but lately we’ve been seeing older but working equipment come through our doors. Every time I’m shown a piece of working electronics I ask myself what they must have replaced it with.
Perplexed at the idea of someone tossing a working (and boxed) surround sound amplifier and speaker set I asked the customer why. “We upgraded our television and figured we’d change the audio portion,” the customer told me. He went on to tell me the system they replaced it with was probably not as nice but looked a bit more modern.
I can understand recycling VHS players and other obsolete electronics, they simply serve no useful purpose anymore. There’s a normal lifecycle all technology follows and depending on whether it fails or becomes passé dictates what happens next. Clearly if the item fails and costs less to replace it ends up in a recycling pile like mine.
My favorite item this month was the JVC surround sound amplifier with HDMI inputs. When I heard about it I immediately asked my brother to connect it to a pair of speakers and run a few tests. He left it connected until I showed up at his store and had a chance to play with it myself. It was perfect.
Some technology simply doesn’t have an obsolescence timeline and never needs to be replaced. Speakers are a perfect example because the technology has been the same forever and with the exception of cosmetic changes they should never need replacing. For some reason we still end up with a fair share of reasonable quality bookshelf speakers and subwoofers.
I’ve learned that people are less apt to replace a piece of technology when they see the minute changes the new device offers over the old. Oddly, it’s things like a smaller remote or a buffed cosmetic finish that draw people in. Most people pay attention to technology upgrades like Bluetooth until they put their equipment into service, then they quickly forget and use it as they did the original.
The oddest items we receive are cables. Since Christmas I’ve had hundreds of pounds of wire filter through my stores. We usually untangle the giant balls and sort the cables we can use and recycle the rest. It blows my mind that fully functional cables end up in our pile.
I could rattle off a host of cables you should probably hang onto rather than recycle, but I don’t have enough space. Power, HDMI, USB and Ethernet cables don’t change often and take up little room. Rather than put more money in the store’s pocket when you upgrade the rest of your system, reuse your old cables. Most people don’t realize all HDMI cables have to meet standard requirements.
When this stuff comes through the doors I cringe at the thought of my recycler scrapping a working piece of equipment. I can’t begin to tell you how many of these items end up in either my living room or one of my employees’. Is it really worth making an upgrade when what you have works perfectly?
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)