It always seems like the beginning of a new year is the best time to look back into the past. Last night a new four-part special began on PBS on The Pioneers of Television. This fascinating history of TV from ABC to Zworykin is worth checking out, especially if you spent any time at Boxing Day electronic sales. Don’t see the connection? Well, this may have been the last holiday season that we will ever see cathode ray tube TV sets in the stores.
What is a CRT television? Well, they’re those front-heavy motherfuckers that you need two strong-fingered friends to move. You probably inherited one from your parents when you moved into your first apartment.
Chunk by chunk, LCD and plasma sets have taken over the market. As a result, those clunky antiquated CRT televisions are getting harder to find. Panasonic announced in September that they would no longer be making them in their Chinese plants, and Sony is currently phasing them out as well.
Even more options are being whittled down. Last week Sony announced that it would stop making rear-projection TVs in February, which once was the only format alternative in large sets. Sony hopes that ditching rear projection (as everyone else has) will turn their books around, after losing $500 million in the U.S. television division from April-September of 2007.
Compared to LCD and plasma’s maneuverability and superior picture (which some CRT nuts dispute), CRTs don’t seem to have much to offer, except business to chiropractors. But what do we do with them now?
There are a handful of electronics recycling centres in Canada that deal with our cast-offs, but it’s a losing battle. “E-waste” is amassing at an alarming rate, and it’s not as simple as recycling pop cans or newspapers.
The average cathode ray tube comes encased in glass (for our protection) and contains about eight pounds of lead. If it breaks during the recycling process, it can become a serious toxic waste problem. Newer CRT sets also contain mercury and beryllium, which are also hazardous. Workers in e-recycling centres have their blood tested weekly to watch out for possible contamination from these and other carcinogens.
The best CRT dismantler can take the sucker apart in about 90 seconds, after which the set is shredded (literally) within 16 seconds. In that time, nearly 700 new TVs will have been made in China. Scary, isn’t it?
Compared to electronic waste, carbon emissions smell like roses. Europe began recycling electronic waste in 1991, but now countries all over the world are scrambling to figure out what to do with all this twisted glass, plastic, and wire. While e-waste might only account for two per cent of the trash in American landfills, it makes up 70 per cent of their toxic waste.
Many countries just ship all these unwanted sets off to India, China, and Africa, where e-landfills are wreaking havoc upon local environments. If the sets can’t be used, they’re often ground up manually by children with no gloves, and then the lead- and mercury-filled components are used to line irrigation ditches or pave roads. Lovely. Even closer to home, “recycling” old TVs and computer monitors often means “finding a deep lake to dump them in,” as legislators in Minnesota found out recently.
But television has had a short history, with fewer than 100 candles on its birthday cake for all practical purposes. The Pioneers of Television is a good reminder of that fact, especially if you watch it on the CRT set in your basement.
Lest we get too sentimental, let’s not forget that on Monday, the annual international CES tradeshow starts in Las Vegas. Three days of consumer technology bells and whistles, which also happens to overlap with the annual Adult Entertainment Expo. If you ever wanted to do a boys’ week in Vegas, this is the week—gadgets and porn, as far as the eye can see.
The future is here, and CRT now stands for Charged Recycled Trash. And that includes the porn.
