My car is twenty-years old and has over 200,000 miles. But it seems to be in better shape and shows less wear than a previous Volkswagen I had built in the 00s. I’ve had three TVs break since replacing my first one — a 13-inch Magnavox that followed me around the country from 1990 – 2007.
Those were the days. Now, the things we buy can do so much more but seem to have a lifespan drops off at about the same time a new model arrives. It comes as no surprise — we have been constantly increasing our consumption, and with the primary goal of pretty much any company being growth, the only way to sustain this is to consume more. If Philips sells you a TV that lasts twenty years, they may have lost you as a customer for a long, long time.
To most people, being Green just means buying more stuff. But non-toxic recycled stuff! Sustainability has become quite the new marketing tool that is completely counterproductive to actually sustaining anything.
I recently came upon a blog post by Open, a little bicycle shop near Boston, MA. I had been in there once sometime last year, before they even had an official sign on the door. They talk about the idea of repairing vs. recycling (or trashing) — a dilemma they face often with all the broken bikes and parts coming into the shop.
As with most other consumer goods nowadays, it’s more often than not easier and cheaper to toss an old part and sell the customer a new one. The problem is that there’s no longer an incentive to design and build things that last. As a trade off we have poorly-designed products manufactured by wage-slaves that we can buy by the boatload because they’re so cheap.
The solution, of course, is to design higher quality goods that can be repaired. There are lots of benefits — personal satisfaction of a challenge, learning more about the product, and reducing consumption. (Check out this “Repair Manifesto” by Platform21).
The author also gets into what no business owner wants to talk about: whether it is counter-productive for a company to discourage consumption. In the end, he reaches a conclusion that it’s quite the opposite.
“I personally enjoy the meta-material relationship of a repairer to ‘repairee’ more than the reductive relationship of the seller to consumer, and as people (re)learn to appreciate and support the craft and art of expert repair, I think that my business will flourish.”
- Dustin