Do you know what obsolete means? Making things obsolete is a clever way companies have of getting you to buy another newer type of something you already own. Here's how it's done... I guess you have a CD player of some sort. It plays your CDs which is the main idea. Maybe it also does clever things like remembering your favourite tracks. But within a few weeks or months of you buying the player (or TV or computer), you find that your model doesn't exist any more. Another 'newer' one is now in the shops. And it does more things than yours did - as well as actually playing CDs (which is all that really matters if you just want to listen to your favourite music). The point is it's NEW and IMPROVED! So really you should throw away your old one and buy it, shouldn't you? If you don't, you'll somehow be missing out. After all, your friends with plenty of money will already have it. That is the message the ads push at you.
     So people do it. They throw away perfectly good things so as to have the latest version. And, just in case the ads fail to make you want to 'upgrade', you'll find that if you accidentally damage your player or whatever or a part of it goes wrong, you can't get it fixed. Why? Because it's obsolete. The company doesn't make it any more and there are probably no spare parts for repairs. And if there are any spare parts, fixing it will cost you almost as much as buying new. So you buy new. Clever, isn't it? Of course none of this would matter so much if the bits and pieces which go into making CD players, computers and stuff could be used again: recycled. At last, some things are beginning to be recycled (like metal from cars) but mostly everything ends up thrown onto garbage tips to add to the mountains of trash. Humans are real experts in taking perfectly good stuff from the planet and quickly making it into trash!