WTF am I?

garbagepro:

Durable, high-tech, sexy — but what do we do with something that doesn’t go away when we throw it away?

CBC Documentary on Plastic

Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na­tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill. But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet.

A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution. Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource. Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment.

Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braun­gart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption. (Excerpt from vpro.nl)

garbagepro:

Waste. as defined by thefreedictionary.com:

n.
1. The act or an instance of wasting or the condition of being wasted: a waste of talent; gone to waste.
2. A place, region, or land that is uninhabited or uncultivated; a desert or wilderness.
3. A devastated or destroyed region, town, or…

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In the past couple years I’ve repaired my own LCD TV (Samsung 36” - a capacitor on the power board was burnt out, so I did a search and found out it was a common problem; watched a video on how to fix it, purchased a capacitor for under $5 and a soldering kit for about $30.  Add in less than a half hour of my time and I once again had a working TV), computer monitor (a friend had given me an LCD monitor that worked intermittently, but after repairing my TV, I thought it might have the same problem… turns out it did, and this time I already had the soldering kit), and digital camera (a 10mp Fuji Finepix - I cracked the LCD screen and it doesn’t have a viewfinder; I ordered a new screen online for $30 all-in, and spent about 15 minutes).  

All three of these repairs cost me less than any one of them would for “professional” repair or replacement.  

I also periodically “repair” my ipod classic by whacking it against a wall or a desk to re-seat the hard-drive (or w/e it is that keeps messing up)…  One of these days I might look into opening ‘er up and seeing what else can be done.

The best thing about fixing your own stuff?  Learning more about how it works (oh and saving money doesn’t hurt).