SemiAntics

Dell used to be a decent company. What happened? Grace got a Dell Photo 924 printer as a present a few years ago. It’s a rebranded Lexmark X615 (I have heard, but obviously nobody is confirming this!) It doesn’t have drivers for GNU/Linux (or Mac). It’s described as an expensive paperweight by some people, and accurately too. To get to the point, the power adapter went bad on it, so I thought I would get a new one and sell it so that we could have one that works on GNU/Linux. To my surprise, the new adapter from Dell is $50. They even recommended that I buy a new printer rather than get a new adapter! What a horrible waste! I asked them what I was supposed to do with the old printer. They said I could recycle it (send it back to Dell for free and they would re-manufacture it and sell it again). So Dell gets paid twice for the same printer. Nice.

It turns out that Lexmark sells the adapter for $20 and you can even find it online for about $8 used (plus shipping). That’s more along the lines of what I expected. I will never buy another Dell product (my first laptop was a Dell, and that is back when they had good customer support). I recommend that everyone avoid buying Dell products. It’s just not worth it.

Plastic is everywhere. There are a million ways that plastic is good for humanity; there are also a lot of ways it’s bad for humanity (and the environment).

Plastic is not easily recycled; at least not all of it. For instance, how do you recycle a computer? What is it, number 1 or number 10? There is a lot of plastic in a computer, and there is a lot of metal mixed with it. It’s not a good idea to just dump this kind of stuff, but that’s what we’re doing for the most part.

Plastic is in your food. Several studies have shown that some chemicals leach into bottled water. You can taste it, so there must be something to it. What about microwaves? Microwaving certain types of plastic can lead to leaching into the food as well, or so I’ve heard. Plus, microwaving things like spaghetti in a plastic container pretty much ruins the container.

For food, we should try to use reusable containers. In cases when we can’t use reusable containers, we should try to use recyclable containers as best we can.

For me, I have found that Pyrex makes a really nice glass container set with plastic lids (which you remove before microwaving, and which don’t touch the food typically). These containers are very nice, easy to wash, easy to stack, and reusable until you break them.

Glass, unlike plastic, does not biodegrade. ( Edit: I meant to say glass doesn’t degrade. Plastic does degrade which is bad, but it doesn’t biodegrade; it simply breaks down chemically, especially when exposed to UV light. ) Therefore, it is less harmful to the environment, in my opinion. Another thing about glass is that it’s recyclable. No questions asked. Finally, it is not directly derived from petroleum products; therefore it is probably more of a renewable resource than plastic.

Let’s not forget that metals are usually recycleable and reusable.