governments failure to be proactive on the CRT disposal issue

Originally Posted by Scrappah

This just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

It's no secret that i'm no big fan of government involvement because it tends to create problems not solve them.



If you check out most of the "bubble back" tv's and computer monitors going into the waste stream they're still working. The reason they're being replaced is because they've been made obsolete by government decree.

This goes back to the Clinton era. There was the mandate that all of the broadcasting stations had to switch over their equipment to send out their signal in HD by a certain date. Then there was that government program where you could send in and get a coupon for a free converter box so that your analog tv could still receive the signal but that kind of setup doesn't work well if you're more than 60 miles from the broadcast station. ( In this area, it's all but useless.)

It looks like the guvmin't got the ball rolling on this cluster***k.

I think we can all agree that this issue is a huge toxic waste problem that's a threat to people & the environment ?

For the record it was the invention of the LCD that made CRT tvs and monitors obsolete, not the government. True they pushed to get one into every home in america, but it's more the evolution of electronics rather then program intervention.

Originally Posted by logansryche

For the record it was the invention of the LCD that made CRT tvs and monitors obsolete, not the government. True they pushed to get one into every home in america, but it's more the evolution of electronics rather then program intervention.

Are you really sure ? It's hard to figure the broadcasting industry voluntarily incurring the cost to change their equipment over. If it hadn't happened that evolutionary branch of electronics would have died.

Look at it another way .....The consumer wouldn't have gone out to buy High def gear if the signal wasn't available for it. The broadcasters wouldn't have changed over to high def if there was no consumer demand for that product.

By that reasoning it comes down to the government forcing the matter. The guvmin't seems to be the one most directly responsible for instituting the change and all of the toxic waste that was generated by it.

I wonder if the thing that motivated them to force it was energy efficiency. These new flat screens are remarkably energy efficient. They've got the old crt's beat hands down in that department.

Isn't that the truth, makers are sacrificing picture quality for it though. My main tv's a 32" Sony CRT that has better picture quality then my father in law's flat screen(and no dead pixels to worry about). It's also why all my computer screens are still running CRTs instead LCDs.