I think those what are causing environmental/health hazard or hoarding live animals should be dealt with by the appropriate authorities – but at the same time these programmes can lead to folk adding needleslly to the landfill piles.

also I – and a great deal of chaps my age or older across Europe and Asia (in fact in the foreign lands youths and girls also participate in this) quite deliberately hoard broken or obsolete electronic equipment. Dad did this, and so do I. In Malaysia old Chinese dudes pick up all the unwanted hi tech kit and take it back to makeshift labs where mostly young men but often entire families fix it or make it into other stuff.

Firstly its illegal to just put it in the trash nowadays (some things are really hard to get shot of like CRT monitor tubes) – secondly bigger things especially can be gutted and lots of useful components recovered – for instance a faulty electric fan, a busted monitor and a microwave oven yielded enough components to turn my bedroom mixing setup in to a broadcast quality radio studio. Even the microwave case got reused as its a decent quality aluminium case and provides good earth for radio reception.

Loads of magnet wire too, which otherwise costs £15 a spool nowadays due to the price of copper and which I use to make coils for radio antennas (they keep away bad interference and let in good signals). this saved me having to get the components from Leeds and more materials used in China.

I have been known to not wanna throw away old magazines or boxes from my gizmos and gadgets, but I don’t think i’m a hoarder.