Wednesday 9 June 2010

Invisible sources of waste

I have said for a long time that the only true "evil" in the world is waste, whether that be the waste of material goods, resources, life (as in murder or negligence), trust (lies, theft and other types of deceit), self-worth, dignity, faith, honour, reputation, time--all the things that are undesireable in our world that I can think of can be labeled under the heading of "waste".

A couple of months ago, the glass jar for our blender broke. A quick look online showed that replacing just this part would not be easy. There are replacement jars available, but they come from a different country and the shipping costs more than the entire blender. I could replace it with plastic, which would be easier to get, but would not last as long or, IMO, be as healthy a choice as glass.
I like the blender. It's not perfect, but worked well enough. We replaced the fuse about a year ago, but other than that, plus the ordeal of having to scoop out stuff that gets stuck in the bottom under the blades (a dilemma common to every blender I've used), it's worked well for us.

Being without a blender (or chopper, food processor, etc.) has made it nearly impossible to prepare some of our family favourites.
So I went online to the Canadian Tire website to see what my options would be for replacement. I was astonished to read how people replaced it after "burning out the motor". Sounds to me more like a burnt-out fuse by the descriptions given.

This reminded me of the family I know (that shall remain unnamed) that replaced their entire cordless phone when their rechargeable phone battery died. The batteries are quite common and easy to replace, but they opted instead to replace the whole thing--and not just once either!

So now I wonder how many perfectly good items are thrown out because the owners either didn't know they could easily replace a part, couldn't be bothered replacing it, or, in the case of the glass jar, couldn't find a necessary replacement part.

BTW, anyone happen to have a spare glass jar for an Oster blender that they no longer need? OR, does anyone want or need the bottom part (motor) of one?

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