My parents had one film camera for most of their adult lives. They had it before I was born, and they continued to use it after I left for college. It still works today. So does their old black and gold RCA radio, purchased sometime in the 1950s. Ditto for their electric typewriter, which I learned to key on in the 1980s.

By contrast, I'm already on my third digital camera. I'm also on my third MP3 player. I recently picked up my fourth cell phone, and I'm on my fifth laptop. And anything that I'm not currently using is long gone; either busted and being pecked at by gulls in a landfill or collecting dust on a shelf at a Goodwill store.

Technology disposability has become a significant problem. Unlike the machines sold to our parents, the gizmos we buy today don't last more than a few years. Gone are the days in which showing off an aging yet still perfectly functional piece of gadgetry for your friends would elicit an impressed whistle and comments concerning the item's master craftsmanship and reliability.

You might be tempted to blame those who make the machines. After all, they're the ones who design these products that fail to last more than a few years. Plus, they have a perceived stake in making us buy their products as frequently as possible.

However, they could do business just as easily by building more robust and longer lasting products, reducing volumes, and increasing the profit margin per product sold. The reason they don't do this? Us.

In the past, corporations used to make a product and tell consumers why they needed it. But, as any modern corporate executive will tell you, things have changed. Consumers are now the ones in the driver's seat. We tell corporations what we want, and they deliver. Ergo, we don't want cell phones, music players, cameras, or computers to last decades. We want disposable products. We want higher resolutions, more storage, faster speeds, enhanced functionality, and newly fashionable form factors. Sure, we often get mad when a gadget breaks, but in the back of our minds we think it was probably time for an upgrade anyway.

Seeing the massive amount of waste generated by our ravenous thirst for disposable technology, many manufacturers have implemented impressive recycling programs. HP leads the way with a total of more than one billion pounds of reclaimed and recycled material. They did more than 250 million pounds of recycling in 2007 alone.

Gadget makers are also greening up their manufacturing processes. Just outside the city of Osaka in Japan, Sharp operates perhaps the greenest television manufacturing facility on the planet. It's powered by a huge, roof-based solar panel farm as well as cutting edge sun-harvesting windows. One-hundred per cent of the plant's waste water is recycled, and the facility uses environmentally friendly materials, like a new type of corn-based paint developed specifically to help reduce carbon emissions created during the recycling process.

But while manufacturers are actively reclaiming, recycling, and reusing the technology they sell, it's up to us to reduce the quantity of gadgets we consume. As a society, we need to agree that we're okay with not replacing our Blackberries and ThinkPads whenever a new model is released. We have to show manufacturers that quality craftsmanship means something to us, that we're willing to spend more upfront for better-built products that are designed to last more than just a few years.

How do we do it? Remember, manufacturers give us what we want. The next time your mobile breaks, spend a couple hundred dollars to repair it rather than buying a new phone. If enough of us do it, manufacturers will get the message, and longer lasting gadgets will be just around the corner.

The trick is to deprogram ourselves of our newer-is-better mentality, which, admittedly, will be hard. It's far easier (and, in many cases, much cheaper) to just buy new stuff when our old stuff breaks. But we have to do it, because no one will do it for us.