I bought a printer on sale last Christmas and now it doesn’t work and I want to kick it and spit on it and smash it against a brick wall. What happens next is a story that repeats itself in households across North America. I need to decide whether I’ll take it in to get fixed (god knows if the warranty is still good or applies to what’s wrong) or buy a new one at half the price of what it would cost to repair it. Sure, I would have a new printer, but I’d also be adding more junk to the growing number of dumped electronics on this planet. Happy with working black ink? Or ungrateful and green?

Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Electronics” couldn’t come out at a better time. After watching her short animated film, I realize there’s not a whole lot of good that can come from passing on my old printer. For starters, according to Leonard, my printer was originally “designed for the dump.” Even if I did decide to purchase a new printer and recycle the old one, the chances of it joining the e-waste export cycle are pretty high. That means that one person in a developing country will be responsible for taking the printer apart, harvesting it for reusable materials, and burning the rest. Not only will I be contributing to an unhealthy economic cycle, I’ll be putting that worker at risk by exposing them to my printer’s chemical contents. The more I think about this printer, the more depressed I get. Thankfully, Annie Leonard and the fine folks at Free Range Studios didn’t leave me hanging without a solution, or, at least the beginning of a solution.

According to Leonard,  we’re all living in an unsustainable materials economy. To break this unsustainable cycle, we need to demand that companies who produce these materials and governments that regulate their production initiate “Product Take-Back” programs. Imagine a world where every time a company releases a product, they consider it’s life cycle and integrate a process that allows the consumer to return the product for safe re-use at the end of it’s time. Now imagine that this was the law. There would be no more temper tantrums when the printer you thought was such a steal breaks down (at least the dramatics would be kept at a minimum.) You could part with the printer with a good conscience. It’s a mighty big idea and we need to consider that big box electronic companies are not the only players in this game. We need to invite governments to the conversation as well. It’s time we supported this kind of “Take-Back” thinking.

For starters, I think I should send the Prime Minister my printer. Or what if we kicked off a campaign, asking Canadians to send their empty ink cartridges or old cell phone chargers to parliament, with a note attached? Wouldn’t that be something: 3.2 billion cell phone chargers earmarked for parliament. Now that’s not something they could ignore.