David Tudor Quotes

Cheap electronics are not built to be repaired. They're just used and then discarded.

We live in a disposable, 'cast-off and throw-away' society that has largely lost any real sense of permanence. Ours is a world of expiration dates, limited shelf life, and planned obsolescence. Nothing is absolute.

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.

I don't subscribe to the view some people have in the industry that you should purposefully design products that do not last that long. I don't think it is good for anyone.

Today's trend ends up in tomorrow's landfill.

I don't mind 800 million Chinese drinking a bottle [of Coca-Cola] a day, but I don't want them to bring back the empties.

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

We live in a disposable society. It's easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling.

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

The reality is that a consumer culture which chucks out its iPhones for a new version every nine months is completely unsustainable, because Earth has already reached the tipping point. 'The General Strike' attempts to personalize these issues and encourage listeners to look for a new model.

We can no longer throw our waste away because there is no away.

Superdevelopment leads to a throwaway society and to enormous waste. Excessive access to all kinds of things,—sometimes called consumerism—enslaves people and does not make them happy.

Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end..

People mean well. But there is an unintended consequence of giving people bigger recycling bins and more opportunities to recycle—soon they want to recycle everything.

Single-use wearables are tough to sustain from a user perspective.

I threw my TV out years ago.

There's a value in used electronic equipment, and currently, there are small, domestic recyclers that process this equipment safely. But they have a hard time competing with facilities overseas that have few, if any, environmental and safety standards.

E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the United States and can pose serious environmental and health problems here and around the world when not handled properly.

There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.

We are buying stuff we know we don't need, and that is a problem we should face in design. It starts with creating an object that transports through time a valuable idea: that it can live forever.

Every conflict is emblematic of the throwaway culture.

On the one hand, we're constantly told about recycling and cutting back, and on the other hand we have to buy the next gadget that comes along three weeks after the last one you bought. It's absolutely insane. We've been suckered into buying and buying and upgrading and upgrading. We're being given two very different mantras at the moment, I think.

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.

Some have an idea that the reason we in this country discard things so readily is because we have so much. The facts are exactly opposite-the reason we have so much is simply because we discard things so readily. We replace the old in return for something that will serve us better.