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I’m not sure your point about the fully burdened real economic and environmental cost being higher than the repair cost makes sense.

First, you’re assuming a world of infinite resources where production and disposal have no burden beyond their direct consumer cost which is simply not the case. Common consumer goods have massive externalized costs that are not reflected in the final price tag.

And second, the idea that I can offset environmentally detrimental choices by volunteering elsewhere also assumes that we live in a world where those original choices don’t compound.

No, I don't think fanzhang's point assumes infinite anything.

To give a more concrete example than GP's repair of an LCD, let's think about repainting a car. Doing this in your back yard like your grandfather might have done it certainly has much higher environmental costs than the original paint job. You'll spill paint-stripper on the grass. You'll buy two tins of paint and throw the leftovers away when you move house. You won't have the factory's precisely monitored spraying, and air filtration.

Of course the point of repairing is that it saves all the other parts (like the engine!) so the balance may well be positive. But we should not assume that any options are zero-cost.

They are assuming that prices reflect the costs of the products. Externalities however are completely mispriced, so comparing the monetary value of buying new vs repairing is very misleading.

Clearly some things are not worth repairing, and there is a cost-benefit analysis to be done but there is just a staggering amount of stuff that is easily repairable that gets thrown away. TVs get thrown away that need a few dollars worth of power supply capacitors. Phones get thrown away over a $10 battery. Refrigerators get thrown away over a $20 thermocouple. Graphing calculators get thrown away because TI was too cheap to solder the battery contacts and the spring contacts get loose after a while.

I think these types of cases are far more common than people putting a ton of effort into something that isn't really worth repairing.

If there really is such lost value on this, then maybe a startup could capture it, by re-purchasing things, fixing them and reselling them.

But there is a reason why that is not such an easy business. Take for example startups that buy furniture when you move out and have to re-sell it: furniture is worn but usable, and it is very hard to sell at a profit after handling it.

Many times we can see a market "inefficiency" or lost opportunity value,but its not easy to make it real.

Why must such things be driven by start-ups and not simply culture?

I am going to guess that people secretly like when their gadget breaks because it gives them an excuse to buy something new.

Because billions upon billions is spent on reinforcing the idea that we should throw away something that's "out of fashion" and have a new thing, because new things make you feel great. You want to feel great, right? So throw away that old thing - get a new thing.

Being able to find a part to fix something makes me feel way better about myself than increasing the pile of junk being sent to be re-mined in some Chinese junk-yard.

Totally agree!

If there is value ready to be captured, then u can just build a solution to capture it. iCracked lives off of this for example.

But it doesnt apply easily to the rest of devices.

My thinking was more of instances, many, where ‘there isn't much value to be captured’. A profit-led mechanic hasn't the scope or motivation to foment much useful change.

I picked up a Steelcase Leap v2 for $150 at a store that specializes in liquidating office furniture from companies going out of business. On the one hand that means there isn't much of a market there (almost 90% discount for a few years old chair is pretty steep) but ... there is a market.

There are billions spent on marketing efforts to bias consumers against buying used goods. It's no wonder that selling refurbished items is difficult.

It's also simply expensive to pay for transportation and marketing and the absird sales tax on used goods.

There's a lot of lost value. But profit is gained by it's disposal, if we bury a TV then there's an environmental cost but the company gets to sell a new TV and everyone up the supply chain stays in a job a little longer.

Profit and value can often point in opposite directions.

Consumers have no point in burying the tv. But they cant easily trade a broken thing for money.

You can go to craigslist and see people auctioning off perfectly fine stuff for peanutes. I.e. I bought a working printer at 25 with ink: its new value is about 100.

But I had to look for it online, find the opportunity, pay in cash, go fetch it, bring it back, and I was also subject to the risk of it being broken, etc.

There are plenty of people running phone repair businesses on eBay, but a lot of people can't even be bothered selling their broken phone to a repair shop.

  Phones get thrown away over a $10 battery.

Wouldn't be so bad if a replacement battery didn't cost $80+.

Replacement battery cost is few bucks. But manufacturer prefers to sell new phone instead of battery and free market doesn't always work there because battery are dangerous and consumer might prefer not to risk with cheap chinese battery (even if it's the same as branded one).

I bought a battery for my father's phone recently [Nokia Lumia], came from a German company [1] who - it appears - produce their own batteries. The only other one's were either the original batteries, which are pretty old now; or were one's being sold on Amazon from China that had very dodgy looking review profiles and claimed to be Nokia product but didn't seem kosher.

Batteries are dangerous and finding trusted suppliers is hard.

[1] Found the German company, VHBW, by watching a tear-down where the reviewer was impressed with the safety features in the device.

I tend to agree with the $10 phone battery example, but not necessarily the TV or fridge example. Perhaps I'm biased because I know how to repair the first, but the latter two seems like I need to take time to learn the specialized skill of diagnosing it and repairing it.

Repairability isn't a very visible or salient feature of a product. So manufacturers probably do underoptimize for repairability. They can probably do more to make the most breakable parts user accessible and have self-diagnostics.

In many of the cases where repairing makes sense, the manufacturer often does make it easy. We change the oil filter on the car and don't throw the car away. Yet if a engine bricks on a 20-year-old beater, even experienced auto repairman may recommend scrapping the car over an engine replacement -- despite the engine being a visually small part of the car.

The capacitors in TVs and monitors are easy to fix. Just look for bulging caps, desolder those, then order replacements and solder the new ones back on. I’ve fixed a couple with no real knowledge other than basic soldering skills and some googling. I’ve also fixed a dryer by soldering two contacts together. It’s amazing what a little soldering know-how can accomplish.

Calling the TV repair man when the TV broke used to be the normal thing to do. Today you just buy a new one. Replacing a capacitor is easy and cheap when you know what to do, but even when you have to call a professional it's usually much cheaper than replacing the whole thing. Still, people don't do that anymore.

And you also called the TV repairman as messing with the HT circuits (which can carry a really nasty voltage) was not for amateurs.

>TVs get thrown away that need a few dollars worth of power supply capacitors. //

I mourn every time I go to the tip, it's pathological with me, however ... the few dollar repair costs in the UK a £100 because of labour costs (and it's kinda like the "you only added one character to the code, why's it cost so much" line with programming, you pay for the experience and knowledge too). So, if there's a chance something else might go wrong then it may be cheaper to get a new one.

I daydream occasionally about having a warehouse where old TVs and household goods are repaired or stripped down for parts but the costs of real estate, labour, utilities, etc., make it something one would really need to do as a charity I feel if you want to keep any significant level of electronics out of the dumps [I've not fully costed it].

When Brexit hits things will start to push more to repair being financially viable, and as the balance shifts towards China in the next decade, as I expect it will, then the economy of repairs will become more of a necessity.

Yes, but if you buy the new display and throw away the old one you have added ($DISPLAY * 1) to the global landfill.

It's not just about the relative value of our time or the relative cheapness of the products.

You make a fair point. The same is observed in lowering quality of produce; this intuitively reasons that "the throwaway economy is bad". However, cheap produce with considerable lower product lifetime can be better as it may typically endure the intended lifetime, whereas overengineered products may last far longer, the invested energy does not pay itself back (the product may be thrown away much earlier).

The cost for newly produced items is almost always underappreciated in popular economics. That's because many factors such as environmental impact, logistics (and its side-effects), resource-mining are not included. Your LCD panel may cost $100 in store, but the government in the country it is produced may pay decades long to cleanup production sites. The government of the country producing minerals may pay years-long in healthcare for badly treated workers.

People understand opportunity cost: thats why they repair their car and not buy a new one.

The repair obsession is not economical, its moral. People perceive that you protect the environment this way, and thus find any excuse to do it.

I think you're over-estimating the amount of people that consider the environment when choosing to repair or not.

You are using an bad example: First, there is nothing to repair. You either live with dead pixels or you replace the panel, which is essentially the TV. Also, if you spend 10 hours fixing a TV, you don't know what you are doing.

A common and reasonable example: a failed power supply circuit in a television. Could be a few dollars in parts and an hour to repair. The key skill is soldering the parts, which is easy for someone experienced. The value of time is relative, I could have repaired a TV instead of responding to comments on HN.

Now, also consider the carbon of shipping a TV across the ocean, then to the local retailer. The trip to the store is the same as the cafe, so I would consider it the same.

To be fair, I don’t think most people know how to repair things when they need to repair something. For example, I wouldn’t even know where to get started with a TV, so 10 hours in total seems reasonable to me

I'm not sure if you crafted such an edge case to dispel the notion that a repair culture is bad or the repair culture doesn't always make sense. Because the latter is true since no one is pushing this out in an absolutist manner.

But you cut out the whole point of the article which is the middle repair man. If someone can offload the fixing to another and after doing cost been fit analysis shows it's worth it, there's plenty of opportunity out there and as such the repair culture is warranted.

Big environmental goals for me:

1) belching less into the air to combat climate change and acid rain.

2) less industrial and agricultural runoff to keep the seas more healthy.

I used to be worked up about making less waste, but as long as we have good landfills that don’t leak much, I’m not too concerned directly with the amount of waste. Recycling is kinda a joke.

People can now go spend their afternoon repairing goods to offset the carbon footprint of their lunch hamburger.

This is presumably why I see multiple people using broken phones everyday. How they don’t slice their fingers is beyond me.

As someone with a single crack across his phone, i assure you u do not slice anything.

I bought my kid a smashed phone, if he wants an unsmashed one I've offered to help repair it. Hope he takes the bait.

Screen protectors?

That's because the glass that shatters is (usually) not the top layer of a touchscreen.

Next time you spot someone you know with a shattered phone screen, ask to give it a try and you'll see.