Enviromental Concerns Throwing stuff away is obviously bad for the environment but many people have come to expect to throw their faulty item away and buy it again after as little as a year or so of use. Sometimes reasons given for this attitude are as follows.. “They are cheap, I can afford it” “It’s almost cheaper to replace it than to repair it” “The new ones are better with more features” “A new one is more reliable than a repaired one” Also for the smaller cheaper items people believe it would be hard to find someone to repair it or that it isn’t made to be repaired. While some of these reasons are true, they are made true by the manufacturers either monopolizing the repair of their products or eliminating the practicality of repair altogether. This is what I call strategically un-repairable and is a strategy that is widespread in a great many manufactured products not just electronics. For example: I was fixing a Sony TV recently and one of the parts required cost over $200.  The initial price of the TV back in 2002 was about $1500 but it would worth around $350 today. The part was a programmable controller integrated circuit that can be bought for about $5 but then needs a program written on it by Sony. A process which takes 4 minutes. So it should cost (including a handsome profit!) about $30. Needless to say repairing it was not viable and a otherwise lovely 32” CRT TV ends up in landfill, all because of a little part 10mm square. So here they have eliminated the reason for repair which is to save yourself money and in my mind at least to also reduce waste. But here manufacturers have also monopolized the repair of their product by making it extra expensive for anyone else to do it. They can charge an unreasonable price for parts and circuit diagrams.  Some refuse to supply circuit diagrams or repair manuals at all saying that to do so increases the chances of their product being copied. Strange then that wasn’t a concern in the days when circuit diagrams where printed on the inside of the product. A time also when all electrical products had a Five-year warranty! Manufacturers would obviously like you to re-buy goods that traditionally would last well over five years. To achieve this not only have they been making it expensive to repair but have reduced the price and in many cases durability of the items. Another example: A cheap dvd player from an typical electronic retailer cost $50 and many think that’s great but what about the drawbacks. Well for a start it’s not really designed to last much longer than a couple of years, is usually guaranteed for only one, is uneconomical to repair because of manufacturer’s strategy outlined above so millions will end up in landfill leaching chemicals into the earth and wasting the energy and materials to took to make it. While you may think that these cheap, low-reliability and strategically un-repairable items will be recycled this is frequently not the case. Recycling companies are presently allowed to ship hazardous e-waste to poorer countries where environmental protection laws are weak or non-existent. Have a read of the RONZ website at www.ronz.org.nz and in particular their link to National Geographic’s article called Hi-tech trash. Those of us that are younger than 35 may not of noticed the implementation of this strategy to make things less durable and un-repairable. You might think your expectations of the durability and repair viability of products is reasonable but right up to the mid 80's toasters, portable radios and tape players, kettles etc. were repaired economically with all parts available. From the mid 80’s onward something happened which I call extreme capitalism but others call the widespread implementation of planned obsolescence. To get a good understanding of what Planned Obsolescence is and it’s many variants have a read of Wikipedia’s page on it here. Link to: Wikipedia – Planned Obsolescence.  Generally it talks about the many strategies companies use to manipulate your purchasing decisions. Changing the style, colour and improving the features slightly each year is another strategy designed to give you the impression that you have the old, ordinary and inferior product therefore implying you are old, ordinary and inferior. It sounds extraordinary to me but it does apparently work on many people, which is why companies are prepared to spend millions for psychologist to analylse your habits and insecurities for marketing purposes. Over producing deliberately short-lived products is only one way we are damaging our planet. I have chosen to write about it because few other environmentally concerned people do. Most concentrate on waste management and recycling, which is good, but I am more concerned with the fundamental source of problems. And yes fundamentally it’s greed.  In my next installment I may write about waste and it’s enormous effect on our environment. Till then search the web for “floating rubbish in the pacific”. It’s twice the size of Texas and will give you an idea of how sad the human race has become. When I was just about twelve years old I looked around me in a bus that was in a traffic jam and I thought of all the towns and cities in the world and their traffic jams, their power stations, factories, pollution and waste and I knew then, like I know now without the aid of any climate scientist that some form of global catastrophe was inevitable as a result.  But of course it’s not inevitable if we change what’s causing it, but we will have to change soon. I'll leave you to think of the neccessary changes, I can think of hundreds! Thanks for reading. Home | Services | Useful Information |  Environmental Links |  Contact Us Copyright  © 2010 Brendan Moore  -  Sustain Electronics  - All rights reserved.