Can Sweden tackle the throwaway society?
bbc.com
bbc.com
One way or another, something ought to be done.
Fixing a five-year-old TV might cost 200$ (but you don't know, there's no guarantee). A new TV costs 300$. Now, if you reduce the VAT for fixing work from 25% to 12 %, the repair cost goes down to 180$.
Is that big enough difference to change the way people act? Mostly not. We still realise that the fixed TV might break at another point next week, and there is no warranty. If I just throw away the old thing and buy a new TV, it'll have 6 or 12 month warranty and 2 year defect liability. So it's still a better buy to get a new one.
Plus the new TV probably has more features than the old one.
Sure, it may not be exactly what people here would want, but it's not necessarily a bad TV, if we hypothesize someone who is choosing between repairing something 5 years old or buying a new one. With what the TV industry has done lately, it's almost certainly better than what they're replacing.
And at the very least, you're risking $200 for a repair. Labor may not cost that much out of the gate, but repair parts can get expensive fast simply because stocking obsolete panels for several years before someone finally buys one has a certain cost associated with it. Factor in the risk of expensive parts, factor in the risk that the repair won't actually work for one reason or another (misdiagnosis, the repair fixes one worn part but there's a dozen others ready to break), and it doesn't take much before replacing the TV is the better choice for the consumer.
That said, TVs are also the worst-case scenario, because TV prices have plunged lately in a way that even the computer industry would be a bit jealous of. It makes the case for repair pathologically poor. Many other things have much better cases to be made; appliances haven't plunged in price, and have large landfill footprints. Bicycles can last a long time if you care for them, and bicycle shops have the ability to repair most things quickly enough that they don't have to charge "by the hour" but can just charge flat fees for various tasks. etc.
It's almost like people already have a decent grasp on when it does and when it doesn't make sense to fix something.
Nobody demolishes a house and builds a new one when a window breaks. And nobody throws away a car with a flat tyre or a bicycle with a broken chain.
I volunteered for a couple years at the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op[0], and helped fix for sale countless bikes that needed 15-30 minutes of work to correct whatever the original problem was.
You're right that a bicycle with busted chain remains viable transportation given a little elbow grease. That said, people who bought a $150 bike probably aren't that invested in cycling anyway, and so when it breaks, even with a trivial repair, it's effectively done for.
I know I'm invoking stereotypes about people who aren't invested in something and get into it in the cheapest way possible, but easily-fixable cheap bikes are the bread and butter at OCBC.
Right?
For example, my mum has a bike like that. She's been putting off repairs for some 15 years now. Mostly it just needs some love from someone to adjust gears and stuff to work again. She knows it's still a working bike so she doesn't toss or replace. But it's easier to just avoid using a bike than to invest the energy to fix that one. We've tried a couple of times but it's juuuust bad enough to need a professional, which increases logistics exponentially.
My point is, abandoned and unused is very different from thrown away and replaced.
If you change the purchasing power parity figures a lot, then it will be different. Fixing a TV may make more sense in Russia, for instance, than Sweden, not to mention some third-world countries.
I think that over time these costs could come down if there was demand as there would be competition and probably sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile. I would like to see more devotion to maintenance and repair but currently the numbers seem unfavorable at least for small appliances.
That right there would kill the repair incentive for me. I keep my stuff for a long time, so a failure is partly welcome. Your new $300 TV in today's dollars is probably cheaper than my old and feature-poor TV. I'm almost like a small distance time traveler every time I buy something more complicated than a pair of socks.
My 7 year old washing machine broke down twice in the past 2 years - one repair would have cost $150, the other would have been $300 - $400, but the part needed wasn't available any more so it wasn't repairable. Nearly all of those costs were labor. All for a $700 washing machine. I'm fortunate that I was able to fix it myself (I found a salvaged "impossible to buy" control board on eBay). For the other repair, a contact broke off of a temperature sensor, I suspect the repairman would have just replaced the $40 sensor, I soldered a new contact to it and saved the sensor.
There's not a whole lot of difference in features (at least not features that I want) for new washing machines -- I don't need (or want) one that's internet connected, I don't need a an expensive touch screen.
I don't even use 90% of the features on my current machine, I don't need a dozen cycles and a time delay down to the second, I just want a few basic cycles and a machine that's easy to repair.
Sweden's move is definitely a step in the right direction but I really wish something like that would even have a chance of passing in the US.
Repair work creates jobs for regular people. This is a good thing. People buying less new TVs just means less corporate profits. This doesn't affect the little guy anyway.
This kind of law kills 2 birds with 1 stone. Pollution and income inequality. I really wish more people would think this way.
Throwaway society stuff is generally dumped on Eastern European outlets (prime example are used cars, white goods, even clothes etc.).
Recently I managed to repair an old iPod Video - it's about 25$ if you want to buy used, working one. I managed to order the parts from AliExpress for about 10$ total. I make enough money to buy myself a new music player if I wanted to, but the fact that there will be one less potentially toxic piece of garbage somewhere in a landfill feels really good.
Wow, I just went down the iFixit rabbit hole of seeing what that entails. My hat is off to you on repairing yours.
Had I been you, I feel like I would have spent the $10 on parts, destroyed the iPod while trying to repair it, then still bought the replacement item--probably something new for $100+ that gets good marks for hackability, and then failed to make full use of it.
I have iPhone 5S and the battery is kind of giving up. Still going to try to find a shop (too bad it won't be Apple official one) where they'd do a battery replacement before buying a new one.
We do but for the kind of garbage like tires and dishwashers the importing/producing/selling party is required to also take care of the costs related to the product after its life-cycle.
Effectively this trickles down to the consumer of course so you've already paid for the disposal indirectly.
http://www.swedishepa.se/Guidance/Guidance/Waste/Guidance-fo...
Of course the ideal would be to make it just as easy to disassemble consumer devices as it is to assemble them. i.e. if the cost of disassembly were equal to or less the value of physical materials in the product.
I was browsing Kijiji the other day and was shocked to see how many people sell their perfectly working appliances just because they are tired of how they look (white) and prefer the newer trend of "stainless steel"...
There is of course the factor that through this people can afford appliances that otherwise wouldn't have them, but that at least has a clear benefit for them.
That's hardly a compelling case for "they need to change their mentality".
Tolerate diversity, please.
These are two of their largest exports, both of which have flooded the global retail market with cheap and disposable goods.
The fact that both of these companies produce more "stylish" designs of throwaway goods does not diminish their impact on the environment or lessen their very sizable contribution to and promotion of disposable culture.
At any rate wouldn't it still be better to not produce the waste in the first place?
Also how much how much energy is consumed turning that waste into energy?
With that said, if you can't reuse or recycle something, it's better that it's turned into energy (if done cleanly) than landfilled.
So the disposable goods are not exported from Sweden, they're imported to Sweden and other Western nations. And typically a part of the brand management is quality control that makes this cheap stuff slightly better, quality-wise, than the generic imports from same countries.
Why does it matter that they source their cheap labor and manufacturing from elsewhere? Furthermore Ikea and H&M are not quality goods.
H&M is crap in my opinion, but I actually think IKEA makes a lot of quality stuff.
From a very recent article - July 4th of this year:
'IKEA Group Chief Executive Peter Agnefjall said the push was due to customers increasingly demanding more durable products.
"Customers expect us to do more (on quality). And nowadays you can't really make products that are throwaway: when you buy a sofa table it needs to be built to last," he told Reuters.'
I mean there you have a C-level Ikea officer admitting there's an issue. What more do you need?
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ikea-quality-idUSKCN0ZK1IX