The large number of printers being dumped on the city’s streets has been highlighted by a photographer from Brooklyn, who has been taking photographs of them for the last year.
Alyssa Blumstein was inspired to take up the practice after seeing four dozen overhead projectors outside a school, which she says have improved a lot more over the course of time than printers and so are thrown away less often, Motherboard reported.
She said that at college many printers would often not work, leaving her unsurprised that printers are the “weakest link” in technology and that so many throw them away, although she also said that “people are shocked at how many I see and I’m shocked they’re not seeing them”.
She now uses a laser printer, which she thought would be “a safer means of printing” than inkjet, but he said it isn’t, as “it doesn’t always print clearly through every line”. Asked to describe the perfect printer, she replied that “we’ve set the bar incredibly low. We expect so little of printers, so the perfect printer is one that just prints when you ask it to print”.
Blumstein has a Printers are the weakest link in technology Tumblr account, where she posts her photos of the discarded printers, as well as some submitted from other friends of hers across the USA. Tumblr and Instagram users can use the hashtag #printersaretheweakestlink to submit photos.