Greeting cards are a wonderful way for anonymous writers and graphic designers to tell your friends and loved ones how much you care. If clever images and phrases just cannot capture your true feelings then you might consider a talking or singing card. Personally I have never been able to tell my wife just how much I love her until I could find a card that would sing “Tequila!”. Finally, humans have achieved the pinnacle of emotional expression.
For my birthday I was fortunate enough to receive a card that could quote “Larry the Cable Guy”. After my tearful joy had subsided I began to consider what it takes to create such artwork. I pulled the card out of the garbage and started taking it apart. Inside I found a small circuit board and a speaker. What surprised me was the three button batteries needed to power this masterpiece of emotional sentiment. I have owned watches that have lasted for many years on a single button battery and yet this device needs three! I am not the greenest person in all the land but I know trouble when I see it.
Just imagine for a minute how many singing/talking cards there are on the shelves today. How long before the recipient tosses the card in the trash? How many batteries are these cards alone putting in landfills? I was hoping that I would not be the first to consider these questions. I began to investigate how to recycle or reuse the little devices hidden in cards. I was disappointed to find very little, a couple of outdated recycling pages and one clever blogger who made his snack drawer sing when opened. No such luck.
So off to the landfill they will go. Once there they can begin to leak heavy metals and acid into our ground water poisoning life on this planet for generations to come. I suspect this is the reason we end up with folks like “Larry the Cable Guy” but I digress. As for my three battery device, I’m wondering if I can combine it with the solar walkway light I took apart last week.
No comments:
Post a Comment