I'd be interested in an answer to this as well. I bet we all have junk boxes - or drawers - or rooms - of good stuff that rarely or ever finds a home.
It's the mixed blessing of mass production - new stuff, even from far away, is cheaper than investing the time required to keep old stuff working. On the one hand, it means that human labor has become relatively more valuable than mere stuff, and that's not a bad thing. Consumer goods are now within the means of vastly more people than ever before, which is also good. But also, stuff I would have killed for is now literally worthless, and there are parts of the world where you can neither see the sky nor drink the water any more.
I have a complete working laser printer/copy machine. It's a big, standalone office-grade unit. I found it on the side of the road and thought I'd salvage it for the steppers and servos, but to my surprise it actually printed a perfect test page just from plugging it in. So it's sat out in a storage shed on my deck for the past 2 years...
The idea of teaching kids how to make use of spare parts to build stuff is appealing, but A: not all of them would be interested enough to see the point, and B: almost none of them will grow up to use any of the resulting skills. I initially tried to shove my kids in that direction, but have had to content myself with teaching critical thinking and problem solving in other contexts since no hardware they build themselves (even with 3D printers in the house) can compete with inexpensive gadgets that all the other kids have.
Solutions? I'd love to have been overlooking something for the past few decades but I don't think I have been!
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