planned obsolescence
Posted on December 30, 2011, in industrialism and tagged planned obsolescence. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
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It really should be that people like cheap stuff. Sure in the past companies could get away with murder, but not anymore as long as the capitalization requirements aren’t too high. You can buy printers like businesses do with support contracts that last a lot longer. You can also buy 20,000 hour incandescent light bulbs through that major online retailer, but they cost 4x the price of a 750 hour bulb. They are dimmer to make them last longer, like the one in the documentary. The pantyhose one is a little hard to believe. It appears they went from denier (hosiery thread density) 40 to 15 and thinner things wear out faster, but don’t sag as much. Amazingly you can buy batteries online for those first generation mp3 players and not from the company that got sued. I have a cordless skill saw whose batteries cost a lot, but found a place online that builds to order at a fraction of the replacement cost. The only e-waste that makes sense to recycle unsubdized here are gold rich processors. I wish something like the method used for cars worked with e-waste. They grind them up and with the use of magnets and x-rays sort them into piles.
As for e-waste, there is a processing facility where I live (Edmonton) where they seperate out the boards and grind them up and process them much like you would ore. Apparently high end electronics has a gold content higher than conventional gold ore. They get the boards out by hand, though, which implies that the gold and other metals content has got to be fairly high to cover such a labour intensive process.
I was wondering while I was watching it: While it may make a great conspiracy story, and it sounds compelling, eventually someone would open a competing lightbulb factory and blow everyone out of the water. Clearly a big part of it is, as you say, us wanting things to be cheap more than we want them to necessarily last. If being easily reparable was a huge concern people wouldn’t buy iPods and the like.