I am grappling with the old “repair or replace” question while I’ve been on grudging prowls of the aisles of appliance and computer and photo retailers, and it’s led me into deeper and darker thoughts about consumer electronics and appliances – which all fall under the definition of e-waste.

My fridge, for example, which has been clicking and whining like a big white mosquito for a couple of months, and sometime during my absence melted and then refroze everything in the freezer, has apparently got a dying compressor. Fixing it costs $700 or so; replacing the fridge would cost around $1000 and seems to be the recommended course of action for an 8 year old model.

And my shiny new netbook met with brutality in the overhead bins of a brutal Ryanair flight from Italy, and when I next opened it the screen was cracked. Replacing the screen costs $250; replacing the netbook? $324.79

And then there’s the dying camera, the oven that won’t quit beeping after it’s been used, the printer that won’t feed paper, and the washing machine that doesn’t rinse cleanly anymore. Not to mention the cordless phone whose battery died and is probably not replaceable, and the growing collection of antiquating computers large and small.

Living a frugal and environmentally responsible lifestyle as I try to do, what’s the moral and affordable course of action? New products seem to be more and more irreparable, and if today’s appliance repairman is to be believed, repairmen are fewer and farther between: he knows of three in town who’ve given up and turned to bus driving, and he’s run off his feet.

The patient young man who walked me through my options in the printer department explained how inkjet printers have an inbuilt flaw: if you don’t use them regularly – let them site for a few months, say – the mechanism that keeps the ink heads clean doesn’t keep up and the heads get gummed up, so your only choice is to throw the machine away (unless you are very persistent and very patient and want to try cleaning it, if you can). And buy a new one.

And if you were wondering what was the difference between the $49 printers and the $120 ones: the cheaper ones come with meagre little cartridges which have to be replaced very soon. And replaced and replaced by new cartridges which don’t hold much either. And as anyone who has engaged in the maddening sport of cartridge replacement knows, the same manufacturer makes sure you are enslaved to their products by making changes to every machine/cartridge pairing. (Oh wait: here’s a trick that might help… a little!)

Another little wrinkle is that if you buy a new printer that uses a usb cable, you have to buy a usb 2 cable (the old ones won’t work); and of course if you have an older printer you might not be able to connect your newer computer to it, as the drivers may no longer be available.

How, I ask myself, is all this even legal? We haven’t really figured out how to properly dispose of these pieces of junk. We offload the problem to third world countries where people are poisoned, maimed and killed trying to make a living dismantling our garbage; and we wait for their countries to catch up with us in our wanton consumption of electronics and appliances, which will compound the problem.

And yet we allow the manufacturers to go on making nastier and cheaper and more unrecyclable equipment that consumes monstrous quantities of raw materials and is deliberately designed to last less and less time… and be unrepairable. In fact our global financial “growth-based” recovery hinges on it.

We are being told we must throw away our television sets – and replace them; are analogue radios far behind? The debate rages in Europe. Not to mention the old VCRs, and the old VHS tapes, the floppy discs, the mini discs and all those other obsolete peripherals. There is a good reason I no longer use a cell phone in this country, which I won’t have to explain to anyone who does.

And we the consumers, who in some ways have least say in the matter, are the ones paying environmental taxes to fund disposing of products designed to break, while we are forced to replace them with newer, cheaper models which we know perfectly well are also subject to engineered obsolescence.

Why do we let this happen? How do we stop it?

Let’s let Annie Leonard answer it again in her timeless video:

To anyone who’s been watching the GM sugar beet issue, it’s perhaps not surprising to see Monsanto being just the tiniest bit manipulative in the media. If the genetically modified sugarbeet they hustled onto the market without doing their environmental impact study is banned, they argue, your sugar prices will rise.

So whose fault would a rise in sugar prices be then, the farmers who planted the beets at Monsanto’s promise it would make their lives easier, their yields higher and their profits better? The consumer, who has no say? The sugar companies who, for reasons we can only guess at, insisted farmers plant GM sugar beets? The multinational who stands to make a lot of money from the exercise?

The arguments against genetically modified sugar beets are pretty standard: if you allow sugar beets to be planted, as Alberta currently does (for Rogers Sugar/Lantic) as did the US sugar beet industry, then you risk cross-contamination of sugar beet’s plant relatives, through cross-pollination. These relatives include table beets and chard, and that puts at risk the crops of farmers who wish to grow them as conventional or organic crops.

Another reason for opposing GM sugar beets is their herbicide resistance, which means there is a potential for increased use of herbicides. Increased use of herbicides leads to increases in herbicide-resistant weeds, which leads to even more use of herbicides. And round and round. Since Monsanto sells both the seed and the herbicide, it is in their economic interest to sell plenty of both. Given the profits it stands to make by selling its herbicides, should we accept the company’s assurances that no harm will come from the residues of their product that ends up on our food, our farmland and in our water supply?

And finally, consumers who simply do not wish to consume genetically modifed foods are once again being sold a food product that doesn’t have to be labelled – so they have no real choice in the matter – and whose health risks over the long term are simply not known. We’ve been told that if we wish to avoid GMO products, we need only buy certified organic. But products like these are simply slipped into the food chain without public warning. And if consumers don’t know in the first place that their sugar is suddenly now made from genetically modified ingredients, how would they know to switch to organic?

One for all my snow-weary British friends. I hope you can stay inside and be warm.

Song for a Winter’s Night-Gordon Lightfoot
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