Quote:
Originally Posted by kx250rider
Very sad to see that waste. I am also startled to see that '50 Philco roundie B&W in there... You'd think they would have tried to separate it and sell it.
Charles
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Nope, too much hassle for the nature of the business they are in... Although some of that stuff has been sorted out, when some of those containers were --for reasons I won't go into-- diverted to, or passed through, Hong Kong. Americans (and Japanese, too, along with local HongKongers) throw out some really nice stuff, along with all that junk!
I know that from personal experience.
Actually, I've spoken about the warehouses I "hunt" in more than once here. They are filled with stuff just like that, except the stuff is usually piled up in stacks, instead of in boxes. Sometimes the boomboxes get put in cartons like that, though, just to keep them from spilling all over the place. What doesn't get bought for export (to countries in Africa, Afghanistan, etc...) ends up going to the same recycling places in China that those TVs are heading for... to be busted up and separated out into re-usable parts and raw materials for recycling.
For the most part, it is a good thing. What would otherwise be toxic waste at least ends up getting partly recycled. Good for the environment, economically sensible, etc... The sad thing is just that not ALL of the stuff that gets recycled should be. Some of it is better-quality, collectible and worth saving. It just isn't practical for the people doing the business on that scale, at that end of the market, to go through and hand-pick the ones worth saving.
The downside to the whole thing is that the villages where the recycling is done have high mortality rates, more cancer, higher sterility and more birth defects when children are born, etc... due to all the pollutants in the gear, and little or no safety precautions. I'm not sure if it is better to have that happening to a relative few in concentrated locations, or spread around where it might not be so toxic, but more people might be affected.
If you can get access to one of those places and convince the people to let you cherry-pick (PAY for the things, of course!), you'll get some real bargains. But you'll have to pick through lots of rubbish to get them.
The world doesn't need to keep piling up more and more stuff that few people want any longer. It makes more sense to recycle things... but WHAT and HOW MUCH should be recycled, and what (and how much) should be conserved and kept in service, is open to debate. It seems a terrific waste to see fine old high-quality craftsmanship, that with minor repair holds its own (and then some) against modern stuff, wasted. But we don't need thousands and thousands of units of BPC piled up.
One real problem is that different people have different types and levels of understanding and appreciation for things. "One man's trash is another man's treasure" isn't just a saying... it's a truth!
The other problem is the challenge of putting into place an efficient system for economically sorting out the should-be-kept things from the let's-recycle things. Sad to say this, but so far, eBay is probably the best mechanism yet invented for that...