Sunday Musings: Don’t Toss SNAFUed Small Appliances

There’s a vital secret that all serious cooks who invest in small kitchen appliances need to know. You can still save money by repairing some small appliances that break – rather than just throwing them away. Here’s what the makers don’t tell you…

Hot Dog Maker - © 2024 - karaca.com.deThe single-use, kitschy but totally unnecessary Automatic Hot Dog Maker…
Do you buy junk like this just because some ad tells you it’s ‘cool’?

I just finished streaming the new NETFLIX documentary BUY NOW! The Shopping Conspiracy. I thought I was clued in to al the tricks and sleight-of-hand marketers use to get us to buy more – of every-thing. But I am chagrined to admit, it shocked even me…

Waste makes profit

It seems that fast fashion, frequent upgrades, sealed products, intense lifestyle-oriented advertising, promoting peer pressure, and more are all part of a huge ‘conspiracy’ to get everybody to buy more of everything more often. Because there is a finite number of people on the planet who are wealthy enough to live like that. And they MUST be convinced to ‘upgrade’ and ‘update’ their stuff as often as possible. The goal being to ensure that the humongous multinational brands continue to grow and satisfy the greed of their shareholders.

The other side of that coin is, those same consumers have to be convinced to throw away, sell or otherwise ‘cast off’ their ‘old’ stuff as often as possible. And that’s created the world-wide waste stream ecologists and economists keep warning us about.

In a recent interview with Time magazine, the makers of the doc sum up their story thus: “It’s a pow-erful reminder to customers ahead of the Black Friday shopping bonanza that landfills and waste sites around the world are filling up with unwanted clothes, tech, and household goods.”

“It’s shocking and it’s ridiculous the level of stuff that we produce and more than that it’s the real-ization that we’re so unaware of the amount of things that we’re producing,” documentary director Nic Stacey said. “For example, every hour, 2.5 million shoes are produced [around the world]! We wanted to bring that to life for people to see…”

Clothing a prime example…

Those clothing donation boxes at every supermarket parking lot are just the ‘head end’ of an almost unimaginably large global machine with only one purpose: make unwanted clothing disappear.

“The Or Foundation, a not-for-profit trying to reduce textile waste featured in the film, more than 15 million unwanted [clothing items] are sent to Ghana—one of the world’s largest importers of used clothes—every week from around the world,” Time reporter Esha Chhabra reveals.

The problem is, there are not nearly enough people in Ghana to deal with all the used clothing that’s being sent there, Stacy explains. “It’s a really jarring sight to see the beach[es] completely covered in dis-carded clothes.” The whole country is in effect, being turned into a monumental landfill.

… Also ‘personal electronics’

Former Apple employee Nirav Patel states that, globally, approximately 13 million cell phones are tossed out daily. The ubiquitous cell is the poster child for planned obsolescence.

The overwhelming mass of adults and many children in the developed world each have one, now-a-days – making it the most-numerously manufactured and sold personal electronic device there is. The other factor – aside from extraordinary market saturation – that makes the cell phone so all-pervasive is that it performs the functions of dozens of devices each of which used to require a separate gadget to address. And it’s ability to run apps makes it’s potential – for human purposes – limitless.

It’s this potential that leads many users to upgrade their phones at the drop of a new model. And it’s not just phones: it’s iPads, game consoles, desktop computers and peripherals. Even flat-screen TVs have entered the toss-and-replace realm.

This hardware turnover is leading to an unprecedented waste tsunami that’s literally flooding third-world countries willing to accept it – endangering the entire world. And the mountains of plastic debris that cycle produces are just the most visible of the dangers. Cell phones contain a host of toxic chemicals including organic compounds and heavy metals that are getting into the air and water in record amounts.

Don’t play the game!

The hardware waste game also includes small kitchen appliances. The smallest ones – such as electronic meat thermometers, ice crushers, popcorn makers, and stick blenders – not to mention, powered spice grinders, pepper mills and Parmesan cheese graters (see photo – top of page) are the worst offenders. Most were never intended to be taken apart and repaired if they break. Replacement parts are not available. Not even batteries. The manufacturers make no bones about the fact that these kitchen ‘gadgets’ were always intended to be used for no more than a few months or a couple of years, and tossed.

Manufacturers have recently been encouraging consumers to treat the next-larger class of appliances – such as bar/smoothie blenders, toasters, waffle irons and so on – the same way.

But chances are, many of these these larger appliances CAN be repaired…

A guerilla war…

Keeping older medium and large kitchen appliances working is becoming a less and less winnable guerilla war as the years pass. But you can still get parts for most. And in the case of the largest appliances such as stoves and fridges, access the expertise of trained service techs to head off disposing of them.

In my home city of roughly 750,000 often frustrated souls, there are still maybe a dozen appliance repair and parts depots. When our dish washer broke down a few years back, we discovered that a replacement part could be had for a few bucks. And the guy at the parts depot explained how we could make the repair in under 10 minutes ourselves, without having to call a $100 / hour service tech.

And when our old, reliable Cuisinart stand mixer stripped a gear, we were able to get a replacement part for under $10, ordering it online from the factory service website. It came with step-by-step instructions for doing the job ourselves.

My take

The are a number of ways we can all help reduce the waste stream. Obviously, we could just avoid ever buying such short-lived novelty gadgets as powered pepper grinders in the first place. Make that any single-use kitchen gadget or appliance, for that matter.

Sister Erin and I now have a policy of never buying anything that can’t at least be opened up to TRY to fix.

Many younger folks have been trained to feel they ‘need’ the latest-model everything, whether they really need or will actually use the newest features or functions. They could save a lot of cash by following the example set by us old-school types who still acquire ‘things’ based on what we need them to do. And can usually get along with older, cheaper models.

Over the time I’ve had my current cell phone, some kids will have tossed their iPhones and bought new models three times. They’ll have squandered thousands of dollars for what amounts to mere status symbols.

Of course, that’s what the monster consumer-goods companies have taught them to do. These ‘kids’ have been bombarded with ‘BUY NOW!’ propaganda their entire lives.

My questions to you

Have you streamed the NETFLIX documentary BUY NOW! yet? If not, you owe it to yourself – literally – to do so at your earliest convenience.

Are you a fast-fashion, shoe or gadget junky?

Do you feel inferior, or at least embarrassed, if you don’t always have the latest-model smart phone in your hand?

When was the last time you actually kept an item of clothing or a pair of sneakers until they wore out?

If I told you that you could save $10,000 or more – or at least keep from adding that much to your credit card debt – every year by getting off the ‘needless consumption’ merry-go-round… Would you do it? COULD you do it?

Muse on that…

~ Maggie J.