Try to recycle—so d...
 
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Try to recycle—so disheartening

13 Posts
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Posts: 1325
Topic starter
(@rebeccabaxter)
    Cornwall, United Kingdom
Joined: 1 year ago

I had a printer, until today, a very large A3+ printer that I really hardly used. When I did use it, the prints that came out of it were stunning, so much better than seeing photographs on a PC monitor.

On two occasions, I've had to replace the print cartridges. There are nine of them(!) and the cost of replacing them all at once (and they usually ran out at about the same time) was well over £200. I used it so infrequently that I was wasting ink every time I turned it on because of the printer cleaning purge.

I decided it was time to give up printing my own as on the odd occasion I wanted a print, it was cheaper to send it off to a professional laboratory.

And so it was; I wanted to get rid of the printer. I didn't want to throw it away, there's a lot of plastic and other materials in it, plus it worked perfectly once the cartridges were renewed. Couldn't sell it—too old—so I tried to recycle it. I went to Argos, a retailer in the UK that the internet says will recycle old stuff, but the assistant there said they WOULD recycle it but only if I bought another one from them of the same make and style—well, I was hardly likely to do that. Off down the road to a place that the internet said was a repair cafe and I thought they might be able to help me find a new home for it. Turns out, the place was a motorcycle repair shop and when I asked about the 'repair cafe', he told me that they don't do that, Google have made a mistake and they won't take the listing down!

In the end, after ten fruitless miles of driving (what a poor use of fuel), it was off to the council tip, where I found a skip labelled 'small electricals' and heaved it in, mixing it with a thousand other printers, computers and peripherals—it all seemed such a waste. I suppose that at least they'll recycle some of the materials; or perhaps they'll just ship it off to Turkey where they'll put it in landfill for me!

It's hard to recycle things, the number of my old mobile phones that have gone to landfill, along with old CDs, video players, dead kettles, computers, print cartridges (Epson ones can't be recycled, apparently); it's depressing how much of a mess we are making of the one place we can live...and along with polluting the ground, we are doing it to the very air we breathe and the seas we get our fish from.

Don't get me started on fast-food restaurants where, when I tell them I shall be eating in, instead of putting the food on a cleanable plate, they still put it in the same cartons and bags that I would have had had I taken it away—total time between start and end of use? About 17 seconds, such a bloody waste.

OK, rant over, back to cross-dressing.

Becca

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12 Replies
5 Replies
Baroness
(@annaredhead)
Joined: 11 months ago

Famed Member     Cornwall, United Kingdom
Posts: 1828

@rebeccabaxter That's a shame, but most appliances these days are designed not to be repaired. Hopefully there is recoverable material in it/

Hugs,

Anna xx

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Baroness Annual
(@fembecky)
Joined: 5 years ago

Noble Member     Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
Posts: 602

@rebeccabaxter 

I had an old really good HP inkjet printer/scanner - quite expensive at the time I bought it about 15 years ago. Like all good HP stuff it even survived falling from a height of about 10 feet a decade ago (I won't go into details 😱 ). It did colour printouts perfectly, but a couple of years ago B&W text started coming out with missing and faded lines; nothing I could do would help. In the end I got a new printer. I spent some months trying options for passing the printer on to a new home. Eventually I contacted the secondary school that my son had attended in the 90's. I explained what the printer could and could not do. Turns out the printer in their design and technology department had just died completely so they were very interested ... and 90 minutes later they had a replacement 😀 .

Rebecca x

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(@rebeccabaxter)
Joined: 1 year ago

    Cornwall, United Kingdom
Posts: 1325

@fembecky I've tried the school route twice in the past. One was to offer an older PC that I wanted rid of because I couldn't upgrade it to run modern games but would do very nicely for a teaching aid, the second time, I wrote to a school music department offering a perfectly good, and really quite expensive, clarinet that I hated playing (I play tenor saxophone); I did not even get a reply from either of the two schools. The PC went to the tip, the clarinet went to a British Heart Foundation charity shop where it was received with a non-committal and off-hand "put it in that box over there"; she didn't even look up and I wished I'd just thrown it in the bin.

I might add that this last is a rare occurrence from a charity shop as another time, we gave a small collection of 'Piggy' ornaments to a hospice shop and the gratitude was in complete contrast to the previous one. We don't give these things away for gushing thanks but it is nice to have a genuine 'thank you'.

Most of my clothing and footwear (both male and female) cast-offs go to the Fire Brigade charity bins; I rarely sell anything on as I hate dealing with time-wasters and tyre-kickers just for a few quid.

Becca

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 Lea
Lady
(@lea-jhene)
Joined: 9 years ago

Noble Member     California, United States of America
Posts: 1103

@rebeccabaxter It irks me that it is so difficult, if not impossible, to recycle many things.

Amazon shopping and Made In X country make it too easy for junk to arrive daily, courtesy of my wife's shopping. I get stuck cleaning the shipping boxes and eventually getting rid of the said items.

Sadly, much ends up in the trash, bad for our environment. Beauty products, broken appliances, countless things, some even working and just old.

I used to think donating clothing to Goodwill or a thrift store was good. Then I saw the prices some places charge for my items and no one buys them, and they too toss a lot into the garbage.

It's all so sad.

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Lady
(@harriette)
Joined: 2 years ago

Illustrious Member     Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 4016

@rebeccabaxter Sadly, this topic reminds me of the Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505, in the movie Idiocracy, which we watched a few days ago.

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Posts: 3437
Hostess
(@ab123)
Illustrious Member     Surrey, United Kingdom
Joined: 5 years ago

At least you have tried Becca. This is a world where we are led by convenience and consumerism that makes mega bucks for a few. Yet they are the ones that make the things and encourage us to update and buy yet make us feel guilty!

We say that our young are more attune to climate and waste but where's the hope in that when they clamour for the latest updated bit of tech. I am not interested in all that as my weakness is buying too many clothes.

I have a computer that runs just fine on Windows 7 with a printer that works with it and are both about ten years old or maybe more.

I recycle what I can and visit charity stores with donations for them, I am not perfect but do my bit. It's all I can do.

 

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2 Replies
(@rebeccabaxter)
Joined: 1 year ago

    Cornwall, United Kingdom
Posts: 1325

@ab123 I went out en femme this very day and went into a charity shop (can't remember which one). There was a costume jewellery necklace which I might have bought for £3, but they wanted £15! I could have gone into a costume jewellery shop just two minutes walk away and bought something very similar, and brand new, for a tenner.

Another shop I had a look in, had a used jumper but it was £25. I subsequently went into Next and bought a new jumper for just £29 and a long-sleeved top for £9.

Why would I buy used stuff with no come-back in the event of it not fitting, when I can buy new for the same (or cheaper) price?

They really aren't doing themselves any favours. Of course, they will say that they have overheads, but they get their stuff free of charge and half the staff are volunteers, their goods should be a quarter of the price of a standard shop.

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Hostess
(@ab123)
Joined: 5 years ago

Illustrious Member     Surrey, United Kingdom
Posts: 3437

@rebeccabaxter I agree with you Becca that some of the charity shops have inflated their prices over the years. Despite the charity tag they are businesses which are national and some are bigger and slicker than others but they do have wages to pay out and would I be cynical in thinking the size of the executives pay? Yes they have overheads but get tax breaks and also free labour but the prices, why pay that when new is cheaper.

There's a town near me that has the usual array of shops and the smaller or more local charities tend to have a smaller stock but they sell at keen prices. These are the ones I gravitate to as have had some great bargains and even have added a bit to the donation box as they are selling too cheap - I don't mention that though.

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Posts: 19
Lady
(@kylikki)
Eminent Member     Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland
Joined: 5 months ago

It drives me crazy that it's so expensive to fix things too. My washing machine is playing crazy. Cycles ending half way, drying program ends up with a drum full of water or it just keeps heating until overheats. 
The engineer told me I need new computer unit. It's 5 weeks wait and 350 euro, of which 20 will be fitting, as they say it's 5 minutes job. 

I can get comparable washing-drying machine for 450, they will deliver it tomorrow and take the old one back... Surely manufacturing a new machine, shipping it half way across Europe, then putting it on the truck with two guys who will carry it upstairs to me should be much more expensive than sending me a postcard size electronic plate and getting a guy to drive his car to my house for 10 minutes work?

And that's not even the worst thing. Some time ago I broke a coffee pot in my coffee machine. Buying a complete new one was cheaper than buying just a coffee pot. And I could have it off the shelf while waiting for the spare will take 2 weeks. 

As for printers, I used to have one of those HP laser jets with fax and whatnot. It was working in the place I worked, suddely it started to scream it needs some parts replaced every second time someone tried to print something. HP told them the thingy is nearly worn out and fixing it will be very expensive. They bought a new one and told me I can get this one. 

I found some hacked software on some Russian forum, downloaded and installed it. All the problems dissapeared instantly - although fax stopped working, but I did not need a fax. 

This was in 2008. I used it quite a lot (I was a student, then my girlfriend was a student). About 2020 it was so slow when rendering pdf. I found a solution that replacing HP system drivers with some open source ones sorts the problem. It did indeed. 

In 2022 finally mechanical parts wear started to show. It was jamming paper, unless you were feeding it one paper sheet only at any time. I still used it occasionally to print small documents then gave it away for free to the lady that occassionally needed to print some documents. AFAIK she still uses it. 

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Posts: 4016
Lady
(@harriette)
Illustrious Member     Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Joined: 2 years ago

About 1 year or so ago, I needed to replace a brand name Blu-ray player that just stopped  working. A big electronics chain had a sale on an inexpensive name brand player. I bought two - just in case the 1st broke down. Neither one of them lasted one year each! What a waste. Maybe the latest more expensive player lasts longer, but my hopes are not high.

What gets me daily is just how much packaging ends up in our now THREE blue bins. It takes only about 1 week to fill all three of them. And I try to not fill them. 😡

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Posts: 827
Lady
(@dazzler)
Noble Member     Cardiff, South Glamorgan, United Kingdom
Joined: 4 years ago

My local lab scans and prints my negs much better than I can, and at a very sensible price. They will even print large when I need them to. I no longer have, or need a photo quality printer. 

As for the printer, did nobody want it?  Such a shame for such a decent machine to go to the big skip in the sky (For our USA friends, for skip, read dumpster)

Cerys

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1 Reply
(@rebeccabaxter)
Joined: 1 year ago

    Cornwall, United Kingdom
Posts: 1325

@dazzler People just don't want old tech, even if it works perfectly. Don't forget, while the printer would have worked perfectly well once fitted with new cartridges, the cheapest I found them for was £218 for all nine—a big outlay on a printer that a new owner couldn't really be sure would work as they'd only have my word for it.

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