"Arfa Daily" wrote in
:

Your feelings on the service industry's future, are touchingly
optimistic, but I fear, fundamentally flawed. As the level of
integration on consumer electronics increases, it becomes more and
more impossible to fix, not only from the fault-finding point of view,
but also from the practicalities of being able to successfully remove
and replace some of the high integration devices - BGA's for instance.
Owners of the gear expect now to bring it in, and collect it next day,
fixed. If they can't, they will go to the local Tesco or Walmart or
wherever, and just buy another, with more whizzbang features on it
than the last. Plasma TVs seem to have gone back for the moment to the
old days of modular electronics, but nothing that the you can ( or the
manufacturers will let you ) fix on the modules, for the most part.
I don't actually believe that even the modules that you are sending
back to them, are actually getting repaired.


That just means that the repair/recycling goes back to source instead of
other people getting a look-in. Sad, but it still allows for one of my
preducted outcomes. It's not a big prediction. Even if legislation doesn't
enforce recycling, it will happen. Think about that heat gradient thing,
the way different melt temperatures allow plastics to separate from each
other. That would benefit the maker immensely, saving them a lot of raw
materials cost. It's in their interset to get the stuff back, ot's one
reason why they like it that way. It doesn't all go to landfill, there are
whole towns in China that specialise in deconstructing stuff to save money
in reuse, and I'm sure the companies would love to automate this, same as
the industrial revolution sought to automate things.

All that I can see happening, with the benefit of 35 years in the
service trade behind me, is that the manufacturers will find better
ways of allowing the stuff to be more readily reduced to its
constituent parts, at what is considered to be its ( commercial )
life-end. Their business is driven by volume sales. For every one high
quality expensive item that was sold by them in the past, they
probably now need to shift a hundred or more, so they really don't
want the likes of us repairing them ad infinitum. Where some serious
inroads to this could be made, is in the cost of spares. How many DVD
players have you scrapped, for instance, because the 50 cent laser
that's in it, comes out at 100 or more times that when it's offered as
a spare ? But there you go - they don't really want us putting a new
one in, do they ?


Then that's where some limited service industry can result. Perverse, I
know, but if buying intact units to strip for spares is the cheap way to
get them, then that's what people will do. I suspect it won't be to do
direct repairs of original gear (except where individuals demand and pay
for it), the firms making it will do that, if anyone does, but there will
be money in it. The trick for people outside the firm's traffic will be in
taking advantage of a cheap item containing parts that someone elsewhere
will pay a lot for. The main problem with this is that many items will have
a high waste to parts ratio. That could be where the enforcing of recycling
comes in though. Once the companies making this stuff identify their
ownership so well that the bulk traffic is to and from them, it might be
easy to make them responsible to handle even dismantled items, providing
the people who dismantled them voluntarily make the effort to return them
at least to a starting point for their journey.

This isn't blind idealism, it's already beginning. Recycling still has a
green treehugging image, but in cities that's rapidly being seen as a basic
service like rubbish collection, but with more detailed demands on what is
put out, and how. Money will drive this, eventually, same as it has for
years with non-ferrous metals. As soon as the price of heavy metals and oil
start to rise as population growth, world-wide industrialisation, and
increasing difficulty getting raw materials grows, so will the rise of a
market for salvage. Wherever there is a need for sorting, even at
domestic level where a lot will be done, there will be a demand for pay
for the work, and as the price will rise, and the work won't get done
without pay, that pay will get paid, though there won't be anything quick
about agreements being made. There will come a complexity and invention of
ways to make money that hasn't been seen or imagined yet.