By no means all of the goods is short-lived ephemera, and of that ephemera much will contain materials that can be salvaged.
Nevertheless I do agree there is a huge amount of needlessly short-lived, even needless, "stuff" made, because so many people think they want or "need" it. And even of genuinely useful or important items, not all of their materials are salvageable.
How much of the re-usable material is salvaged does of course, depend on how their buyers eventually dispose of it. Much does end up in land-fill waste because either their owners are given no ready means to dispose of it properly, or are too lazy to do so.
Perhaps the worst example is the fate of so many irrepairable, supposedly "out-dated" or simply surplus electrical and electronic items including 'phones, toys and their chargers. Yet these contain recoverable metals and their alloys; some common like iron and steel, and aluminium; some less so. like copper and brass; others rare, like gallium, arsenic and gold. It is this that led to the EU creating the "Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment Directive", which aims to stop the materials in scrapped equipment being wasted.
One of the staff at my local Council waste yard told me they had seen good TVs etc brought in as scrap because the sales people in the supermarket-type electrical-goods shops had convinced the customers they had no choice but to buy new. He said he'd discovered this happened even when the fault was simply with a replaceable, external cable, not in the set itself. They had no choice though but to send the good equipment off with the broken ones, to the specialist scrap-processors.
This is before owners throwing out perfectly serviceable appliances merely because the makers have brought out a new model with a slightly bigger screen or a few more supposed "features".....
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Sometimes I see laden container ships out at sea, making their way down the English Channel to the Atlantic Ocean. Some miles out to sea, having left Southampton about 100 miles to the East, they look like cliff-girt islands until you realise they are moving.
