I’ve been using freecycle a lot recently both to unload stuff I no longer need and to fill in some gaps I had as I flesh out my new house. (One day I’ll rant about the usage of “flush” instead of flesh in the previous sentence, I promise!) It amazes me to see the stuff that freecycle is able to redistribute. I strongly encourage you to offer anything you’re considering getting rid of on a site like freecycle or craigslist:free before putting something at the curb.
Anyway, I bought a George Foreman grill a few years ago and used it, maybe, four times. One day I plugged it in and the light lit up, but the grill wouldn’t heat up. I scoured the web for suggestions, but the best I could come up with was ‘buy a new one’. They’re simply not designed to be repairable. So I took a perfectly good grill that hadn’t even been used enough to get properly seasoned and put it at the curb (this was before I used freecycle). Isn’t it crazy that we’ve come to that as a society? That we make products like a grill that are intended to be used for maybe a year or two and then junked? Does that seem crazy to anyone but me?
So I was frustrated. I took it apart and tried to find something wrong inside, but ultimately decided that the circuit board was the problem. Even if I could have found someone to repair it, I find it highly unlikely that they could have done so for even twice the price of a new grill. Some day, the greatest natural resource left on earth will be North American dumps.
Oh, and I didn’t replace the grill.
thethinkingproject 
When I was in Germany, it was the first time I’d seen freecycle. On my brother-in-law’s military base, they had a really nice freecycle shop, or whatever it’s called. My sister would go there a few times a month and there were always amazing finds since so many people move in and out of the base. Instead of people throwing everything out, like we do over here, they’d drop it off at the center.
As someone who grew up taking things apart and (usually) fixing them, it depresses me too that things these days really aren’t repairable. That things are basically disposable is even more sad.
How many toasters, microwaves, TVs, and vacuum cleaners are we expect to own throughout a lifetime? How many disposable 500 dollar cell phones?
It seems crazy to me too.
In our version of capitalism, it seems that the following things have been “done” to help companies “grow” every year; since for some reason, if you’re not ‘growing’ your profits, then you’re dying, and people will sell off your stock to buy whatever the next greatest thing is.
1) Automation
2) Efficiency of design
3) Marketing, convincing people they ‘need’ your product.
4) Planned obsolescence
5) Planned failure
A lot of this I think is driven by a real/perceived desire for everything to be cheaper, etc. Blah.
I’m also frustrated that not only are we pulling things out of the ground, temporarily turning them into products, which then become permanent trash at some point, our manufacturing processes now make almost everything un-recyclable and un-reusable.
The first science fiction novel that I didn’t quite finish actually took place in the future in an environment where, like you said, the greatest source of resources were dumps. There were large mobile cities/factories that could be moved directly over the old dumps, at which point, excavation and reclaimation would start.
Another larger problem is that conservation, and reuse seem to be enemies of capitalism.