Re: Burning old TVs to survive: The toxic trade in electrical waste

We try to but since China makes them now as throw away non repairable cheap goods and sells them global, they should be who leads the cleanup.

This is wildly untrue. What makes things "throw away" is that we can make them so cheaply that the labour to repair them is too expensive for it to be economic. But modern electronic goods are orders of magnitude more reliable than the consumer electronic goods of yesteryear, so the problem is *not* the quality of the goods.

What needs investing in the safe recycling of electronic parts, and I would suggest that both consumers and manufacturers should be responsible for this.

Well... take a programmable timer. Eventually they fail, because the battery in them fail. But they are manufactured without screws that one can undo. That is China fault.

Just like the tire pressure monitors. Lots of labor just to replace them. I just do without on my cars when they fail.

Electronics have been that way in many cases for a while. I remember the Commodor Computers. Not sure of the exect price but they would repair them for less than $ 100 for any problem. You sent them in and they would pull out the circuit board and put in another one that cost them about $ 50. Throw the bad one away.

With labor costing around $ 40 or more per hour the item has to be worth a lot to repair. The local John Deere shop is around $ 125 or more per hour.

I disagree. I had a puncture during a highway trip a month ago, and the monitor told me about it. I would have not noticed myself and would have damaged the rubber.

First puncture in 40 years.

Demand for new items increases with income. After a while environmental responsibility develops. Decoupling that, i.e. shifting labor and financial returns firmly away from production, has not been seen yet.

Is my belief many product categories have seen enough production to last for generations. Unfortunately I don’t see any will to plan and execute a seismic shift in economies which could, even so briefly, pause current capital accumulation streams.

China's no worse than anyone else. You could say the same about Mercedes Benz or BMW. The amount of stuff that ends up in landfill or shipped abroad for disposal is a huge scandal and ought to be THE prime environmental concern - not some nonsense about CO2, which is harmless and not to blame for 'global warming' in any way. What's needed is for governments to mandate a right to repair on all new goods. Wasn't the EU supposed to be doing something of that sort years ago? Why haven't they?