[Green HiFi] Recycling HiFi components made easy (and crazy)

HiFi Waste

Recycling HiFi components

Author: Lucio Cadeddu - TNT Italy
Published: May, 2021

As Wikipedia states: “Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the third component of the "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle" waste hierarchy.”. Now, what should we do with obsolete HiFi components? We audiophiles know quite well the answer: put those on the second hand market, chances are there's someone searching for that component like there's nothing else worth considering on Planet Earth. In my experience, what you consider “waste” might be “gold” for someone else (and vice versa). And chances are you can make someone happy, while earning money and freeing space at the same time.

You could also can set up a secondary system. We all know that's the main excuse for building secondary systems, actually (or third, fourth and so on, don't lie!). As a matter of fact, secondary systems sometimes sound even better than the main one, but that's another story we have analyzed during our recent crash course on downgrading.

Assume you, for ethical reasons (?), refuse to sell a component or that you don't have room for a secondary system. Recycling does help you. Here's how.

Reading a recent article on this topic, on an Italian finance newspaper/site, gave me a good laugh. The article is titled “Do not trash your old HiFi and audio components, as they can become very useful otherwise”. And I started wondering what the fuss was all about. The author, after having considered that now we have Bluetooth speakers which make old audio gear useless (sic!), suggests the following green actions:

Any old tube radio can be turned into a vintage lamp. Just trash anything that's inside and put in some fancy leds.
If the HiFi component has big knobs, we can hang it to the wall and recycle it as a modern art coat hanger
If the HiFi component has small knobs, do the same as at point 2), but use it as a key holder
If the HiFi component has no knobs, just empty it and place on the floor, recycling it as a cat scratching post (assuming it is a wood loudspeaker, for example)

You might think this was intended as a humorous article, but trust me, it was not! It was extremely serious. If you can read Italian, you can find it here. I was hoping to see real examples of the author's brilliant ideas, but found none. Then I took a look at other articles written by him and found that he is a die-hard recycler.

Oh well, I think I won't waste my time explaining to him that some of those components can be repaired and recycled for the intent they were built. Old tube radios, for example, might even have a great value. What else can I say? A brain is a fantastic thing, everybody should have one ;-)