This is circular logic, if the customer is willing to have their items fixed when broken and only buys items that can be fixed when broken than companies will be forced to produce products that can be fixed, right? Or else they will go out of business!
But if the customer just tosses the old stuff when it breaks or "obsolesces," as a company owner wouldn't you want to save some money on manufacturing costs (like taiwanese slave labor costs that much!) by cutting back here and there, knowing that the stuff will be tossed rather than fixed. Would you cut back on product quality? Be honest!
It's sort of the chicken and the egg question, which came first, the toss it and forget it mentality or the products that cannot be fixed anyway. Did we become lazy or did corporations make it too much of hassle to fix their products?
I recently saw a video on scavenging, basically people who raid junk yards looking for useful stuff that they can resale. This one guy in the video was saying that after being out of scavenging for some time he decided to give it try again and he got his hands on some washing machines and they had almost no reusable parts on them, everything was molded together as one unit and couldn't be separated to be reused, basically they were designed to be used and tossed, like tissue.
Now we are entering an era of big issues if we don't address them now, namely nanomachines, I know these sound cool, like something out of a spy movie but this is where the fault falls squarely on the corporations, we are now in the era of SMD electronics which are not reusable and cannot be disassembled because these super small semiconductors are sealed in epoxy and no company seems to handling the issues of what happens to these very small microchips once they are no longer being used; nanomachines will only compound this issue.
I recently heard that some of the jewelry coming in from China has similar chemical properties as melted down computer components, which means the Chinese are just selling us back our own junk!
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of what we get now from China isn't just our recycled junk, this country seems to be taking all recyclables and in any amount you can send. Think about this the next time you buy something that says it's recycled, it still came the same distance as the other stuff, in fact it has probably traveled twice as far, first it had to be thrown away as it's original item and then sent to China and melted down and reformed as the new item and shipped back,where as freshly produced petro-products only travel half a far!
I am not saying that you shouldn't buy recycled, just know where it comes from.
It's easy to blame the companies because they will do whatever is necessary to save money, while bilking us out of ours, but we are the ones who buy the products and one day when we as a human group get through our heads that we are in this game of life together maybe we will band together and either start producing products that can make a positive difference or stop buying from companies who are only after the almighty dollar.
Product information will be the driving force of tomorrows product, sort of like a nutrition information label but it tells you everything you (n)ever wanted to know about the raw material sources for your products.
To end this discussion I would like to say, that if we are unhappy with the products that are being produced, than we the consumer are the ones who have to power to change what these companies produce. One thing that upsets me, is when I see people like Ed Begley Jr. complain about things like the EV one being taken off the market. With all of the pull (and money) this man has you would think that instead of complaining about it and spending so much time and money trying to keep his electric car, why didn't he just rally together with some other activists (with money) and start a car company that produces nothing but electric cars. They could hire movie modelers to design the concept car and even throw a few in a new movie and bam you would have an instant success!
Why not just solve the problem instead of reveling in the issue and not solving anything?
We have the power, we just have to realize it.
