23 January - Electrical waste of time
Bexley
Council has been wittering on about collecting electrical waste for several
years now and I really wish they would do something about it. I am reluctant to
throw redundant electrical items away because many of them contain valuable
metals and rather too many have accumulated in my roof space and a couple in the garage.
I retired my 1986 vintage CD player at the weekend (Sony CDP555Es RRP £999 for
anyone interested) because I convinced myself that its audio quality was not as
good as my blu-ray player and the thing weighs just over 31 pounds.
(The blu-ray player is an inconvenient and inflexible CD player.)
I was therefore more than a little interested to see this X message yesterday. I
can recycle a load of expensive copper! Brilliant!
But No.
The linked web page
requests my address and directs me to my electrical recycling centre. Nathan Way in the borough of Greenwich. What Bright Spark at
Bexley Council thought that was a good idea?
My daughter-in-law who has a way with words lectured me only a week ago about
the need to clear my roof of all the clutter, like magazines going back to the 1950s.
Plus miscellaneous electrical items such as failing VHS recorders, a video tape editing
device, a DAB radio, two DVD recorders and some loudspeaker chassis from the
1960s. “I do not want to have to do it” she told me. The correct response to that is to cut
her from my will so that she doesn’t have to get off her arse to cash in on my demise. Cheeky Madam!
Note: The CDP555Es was the first hi-fi device to include a digital output (SPDIF -
Sony Philips Digital Interface) complete with a warning in the manual that it
was an experimental interface that might not be supported by future models. It
was more than fifteen years before I had anything that would accept digital
inputs.