Australians own 32 million TVs but will buy another 1.4 million sets this year. Half of those TVs are kept for fewer than five years; one-third for two to five years.

You would imagine the sheer volume of TVs in use would mean plenty of business for electronic repairers, yet there are only 200 electronic repair services left across NSW, down from about 800 in the 1980s.

Most fell victim to imports flooding the market and the introduction of the goods and services tax, which drove up the price of repair labour but cut the price of new appliances.

"All of this is leading to more stuff going in the tip," laments the president of the Electronic Technicians Institute of Australia, Trevor Fahey, who anticipates that dumping will accelerate coming up to 2012 as the analog signal is switched off in favour of digital.

Fahey wants major retailers to pay a tariff on electronic goods when they are imported to help pay for the cost of recycling. And, while the TV manufacture and supply industry is slowly moving towards a national extended-producer-responsibility scheme under which suppliers would take responsibility for seeing their goods recycled, many argue the scheme should be mandatory.

But such recycling schemes may come too late for those in the repair industry. "We are all old now," says Peter Schanzer, the executive officer of the Television and Electronic Services Association, who points out many repair businesses are propped up by sales and installation work.

"It's not impossible to repair old TVs and DVD players, but new ones are too cheap, and repairs are too dear."

Spare parts, either branded or generic, were easy to obtain when cathode ray tube TVs dominated the market, says Frank Klamka, the managing director of Star Components, one of three electronic spare parts wholesalers left in Sydney and one of nine across Australia, all sourcing their parts from China, Indonesia and Korea.

But these days, Klamka says, manufacturers often fail to keep spare parts for their products. The new LCD and plasma TVs are often sold without circuitry manuals, so repairers are left like drivers in a strange city without a street directory.

Frequently, repairers will opt to replace a plasma panel at several hundred dollars' cost to the owner, when the problem is potentially smaller and cheaper.

Ian Leisk, 61, who will retire

soon after 44 years repairing electronic goods in the family business at Chatswood, worries about the environmental implications of all those discarded goods. He argues producers should be compelled to charge a refundable fee upfront to ensure the customer returns the product for recycling when it breaks down or they no longer want it.

In the meantime, he is glad his son David, 33, who has taken over the family business, will have a strong line in sales and installation of home theatres and music systems with which to carry on. If father and son and their six staff had to rely on repairs, once a core part of the company, they would have gone broke long ago.

It was not always so.Leisk's late father, also named David, was in huge demand fixing radios in Brisbane in the 1930s. He moved the family to Sydney to relocate his booming business to complement the arrival of television in 1956. Leisk joined the company in 1963, working 12-hour days, six days a week, with few holidays.

Each day during the '60s and '70s peak, the Leisk family fixed 15 to 20 radios and 25 to 30 television sets. In those days, people saved for months to buy luxuries such as TVs, and hung onto them. Leisk knows of Australian-made sets still going strong after 30 years. Today, at $66 an hour for labour plus parts, almost no one wants a radio repaired, nor do they bother to repair the new must-have technology, the DVD player, given cheap new players can be snapped up for less than $100.

Leisk and his colleagues still repair four or five TVs, video recorders and other goods a day, although it has been six years since they last replaced a TV picture tube. New electronics have become an irresistible bargain, as many big retailers offer interest-free deals.

"People once valued their product," Leisk says. "Today, if it doesn't work, it's in the street tomorrow. The Government should look at stopping all the interest-free loans that are around now, because people use these loans to buy more new stuff when they haven't got the money to pay for it."

Tony Backhouse, whose TV repair business faltered under the new tax rules and flood of imports, says the Federal Government has failed to show adequate leadership with making extended-producer-responsibility schemes mandatory to ensure people recycle old electronic goods.

The cost of dumping in landfill is borne by consumers at the point of disposal. "These costs should be shifted upward to the point of sale or on the importation of such products," he says. "We need to avoid over-consumption, where consumers lose their guilt and feel it is OK to upgrade as they [assume] their old equipment will get recycled."

Unfortunately, many seem to be blind to their conspicuous consumption. In their report Wasteful Consumption in Australia, the Australia Institute's Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss and David Baker found that the more a person wastefully consumed, the more they strongly agreed that Australia was a country that buys and consumes far more than it needs. In other words, "Many Australians who engage in wasteful consumption actually believe they are innocent, while everyone else is guilty."

According to a 2004 Roy Morgan poll for the institute, the average household wasted $1226 on items purchased but unused in a year, such as CDs, DVDs, books, electricity, or interest paid on credit cards with interest-free periods. This is equal to about one month's repayment of an average home mortgage. Total "wasteful consumption" amounted to more than $10.5 billion a year on goods and services never or hardly used.

There is a fierce debate about whether manufacturers today deliberately make goods that will falter sooner; some argue a short lifespan is just a natural result of the dirt-cheap mass market and low prices, rather than planned obsolescence.

The repair trade faces an equally lethal nemesis in the growth of "symbolic obsolescence" - as in, what the heck am I doing without the latest fashionable electronic device?

Obsolescence was deliberately built into products by manufacturers half a century ago, says Kirsty Mate, a senior lecturer in sustainable design at the University of NSW, but the practice has since been "stamped on" by consumer groups.

"Yet, on a more unconscious level, we still do have inbuilt obsolescence, because we don't build things to last long, and that has a lot to do with the fact things can be built very cheaply in countries such as China," she says.

"We must think more about how when we design things and they do come to the end of their life that you can actually mine those materials."

Some younger consumers might be confusing functional obsolescence with "symbolic obsolescence", says Cameron Tonkinwise, the director of design studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. "There is certainly a cohort of a younger generation in Sydney at the moment who are cashed up because they are being squeezed out of the housing market, they can get a job easily because there is a skills shortage and they are not really interested in saving for anything big," he says.

"They are a consumptive class, but I don't think older people have the same sort of attitudes. And even within [younger] consumers, it's generally [for new] mobile phones, not usually with other items."

Tonkinwise argues that, given the size of the country, the smallness of its population and the lack of electronics manufacturers, it would probably be impossible to make an electronics take-back recycling scheme compulsory.

He predicts that the growth in cheap manufactured goods will start to slow, however, because the output from China and other developing countries seen in the last decade cannot be sustained at present levels.