It’s Sunday morning and I’m still thinking about something I did earlier this week, an event that was for me almost as disturbing as the first time I deliberately killed a wild animal, or to be more exact a pigeon. I’ll never forget how it fell, bouncing against the branches of the big pear tree, how it lay on the grass, its neck bloody and broken, its beak open and wings flapping feebly as if in an epileptic fit. And then the stillness, the open eye like a black glass bead staring up at me. Reflected in the lifeless bird-eye was a frightened teenage boy, holding his grandfather’s air-rifle. That was one morning in May, Shropshire, England, 1973. I remember the rifle, a BSA, 0.22, with telescopic sights.

This Tuesday I happened to cross a similar threshold of destruction. This time it wasn’t an animal I had slaughtered but a few old, sleeping machines: a TV-set, a pair of loudspeakers, a stereo cassette-deck and a scanner. All of them were in good condition and fully serviceable but I threw them in a skip for electronic scrap at the nearest recycling centre (ÅVC). To destroy working and usable machines is actually against my principles. To deliberately destroy and discard a thing that people have made with their hands is like destroying life, or at least a part of that life. Yet sometimes one is forced to kill and destroy and there is not much choice in the matter. I had no longer any use for these machines. I had advertised them “blocket” a national Internet auction site and I’d checked with the Salvation Army charity shops but there was no way for me to even give them away. I’m certain that somewhere in the world there is someone who would gladly receive these things and use them for several years to come. However, even in this age of advanced global communications, it was completely impossible for me to find them. Here in the most modern country in the whole world there was definitely no place for these four machines. Each one of them had become obselete and locally valueless, a waste of space.

Here’s a more detailed description of the goods in question.

• TV by Telefunken, made east Germany about 1985 “I remember my grandmother used to have on like that”
  - replaced by a 32 inch LCD-TV with HDMI etc.
• Stereo loudspeakers, Phillips, 1990, modest sound-quality, inherited 2007
  - never used
• Cassette deck, 1985, AKAI, silver, with analogue VU meters and 0.25” microphone inputs
  - hardly used since 2001, replaced by digital recording equipment
• Flatbed Scanner, Mikrotec E6, SCSI
  - rreplaced by a much smaller USB-based model, SCSI not supported by newer computers

By getting rid of these machines I recovered a good cubic metre of space in the cellar-store where I plan to install some bookshelves and a filing cabinet. What I’ve done with the old kit is perfectly acceptable. I can excuse myself and any possible users with the fact that I had no choice. Had there been a separate container for living, working electronics then I would have carefully placed the things in there. There is, however, no such means for giving away old machines to people who could use them. There seems to be few if any organisations that deal with re-use of appliances. Perhaps it’s only recycling of materials that can be run at a profit.

I don’t know what happens to all the scrap electronics in Sweden. Perhaps the waste is sold on and ends up being shipped out to some poor country where people work by hand to strip it and for example melt down circuit-boards for copper and lead. It could be that some of these appliances survive the journey and that somebody there manages to find them in a usable condition. I read that Greenpeace had mounted a GPS tracker in an old TV and traced it’s course to a bazaar somewhere in Africa. Things like that can happen sometimes.

It’s certainly a shame that we have no channel through which to send away complete, working devices. This is but one example of the waste of manufactured goods. Instead of being re-distributed and re-used such “waste” is merely by crude recovery of materials. To re-use whole objects is of course far less damaging to the environment. Unfortunately, however, it seems that no one even attempts to design products according to that simple principle. The rule is instead to “use and discard” and “replace everything”, because that’s the way the present economic machinery runs. At the same time it is precisely such short-sighted thinking that is the greatest threat to life on Earth. Global warming is just one indication of this wasteful and non-sustainable society. Others are chemical pollution, destruction of habitats and the exhaustion of material resources. If industrial develeopment was directed at the manufacture of more lasting products, such as electronic devices that can be tinkered with and repaired, then perhaps the world’s resources might just hold out. That would, however, require a great change in people’s understanding of what it means to buy, own and discard their possessions.

One thing I read recently gave me a crumb of hope that perhaps some contemporary designers and manufactures are moving toward sustainable times. The text in question was displayed at a well-known furniture warehouse in Barkaby, among the signs for their collection by the designer Anika Reutersward. Their products were declared as “Furniture to own, to love and to inherit” Well done, I say. We’ll buy that. Only let the same motif be applied in all manufacturing industries and we kan come a long way towards a sustainable society. Let us build things that last, machines that can be repaired, goods that one can be proud to own and keep and which can be used in several generations. If we but practice such principles then most of our environmental problems would be solved. Technology to own, love and inherit. With such there may yet be a future for mankind. Perhaps.

[Translated 091109]

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