Last week our local library organized an electronic equipment recycling day. We had been anticipating this. Dead pieces of electronic equipment had been cluttering up our closets for years. So we brought some computers that had suffered a terminal crash, or that had simply been made obsolete by cunning software updates. They looked forlorn and slightly sinister in the light of day, and I wondered whether they could be brought back to life. Or might they come back to life by themselves? What personal history and forgotten secrets might I be throwing away? So I pulled out the hard drives. Without its hard drive a computer is nothing but an expensive lump of steel and plastic too big for a paperweight and too small for a chicken coop. Even so I was slightly reluctant to load the machines into the trunk for their final journey.
It was clear that many of our neighbors had no such inhibitions. There was a line of cars stretching around the library car park, and an almost carnival atmosphere. Everyone seemed happy and almost enthusiastic about trashing equipment that they'd paid many hundreds of dollars for not long ago. Televisions, computers, amplifiers, cordless phones, piled up in great heaps as each car unloaded. This was old stuff, no matter how much it cost. It was yesterday’s news. The new stuff will be shiny and bright, and not tainted by familiarity. It was an object lesson in how consumer society works.
It may be that the real pleasure in acquiring all these products is the even greater joy of dumping and replacing them. Or it may be that electronic gadgets in general, and computers in particular, cause their owners so much pain and aggravation that we love to see them go to the junk pile, and naïvely hope for a better experience next time.
It's a bit of a mystery where recycled electronic stuff goes. Apparently some of these dated gadgets are restored to life and put back to work in schools in some less fortunate part of the world. Any student who gets my one of my old computers will certainly be among the less fortunate. It could set their education back by years.
Recycling is nothing new. The human race has been recycling the same old jokes for thousands of years, along with the same political promises. Television has become the greatest recycling medium of all time, and hasn't used a new idea since 1946. The ultimate utopian goal of all recycling is to reach a steady state where everything is recycled back to being what it was before, and nothing new will need to be produced at all.
The planet itself, viewed as a global system, is nothing but a giant recycling mechanism. All our air and water are recycled one way or another, although we don't want to think too hard about that. Perhaps the whole universe is just a random mechanism for recycling heat and light and stray molecules into random forms like strip malls and presidential candidates. When these forms have outlived their usefulness, they will be broken down into molecules and reconstituted as something entirely different, and perhaps more useful. This may be the actual secret of the universe. The true answer to the eternal question: "What is the meaning of life?" may turn out to be: "Recycling."
Copyright: David Bouchier
