I think there are very few cases of companies actually doing planned obsolescence intentionally. It's always about the price: if I can get a paint roller frame on the shelf for 50¢ less than my competitor's product, I'm going to capture some market-share—even if my product will last half the time as theirs.

>Look at something like the handle on a paint roller. A wooden handle will probably last a lifetime, plastic handle - with carefully measured amount of plastic - can be designed to break the second time you use it: At which point we go to the shop and buy another cheap piece of crap that will do the same.

I'm skeptical of this, at least to this extent. What company is going to invest the engineering resources to reliably design a particular failure mode in something as inconsequential and cheap as a paint roller?

It's probably far more mundane. Aim to reduce cost/increase profit > use less materials, or use cheaper materials, or use a cheaper-to-make design.

>but what capitalist company wants to make goods that last a lifetime

Serious question?

Luxury brands (watches on the order of Omega, for example[0]) and makers of professional tools routinely use the longevity of their products as a marketing point.

[0]:"You never actually own a Patek Philippe – you merely look after it for the next generation."

There's an obvious cost/benefit analysis that people do when they purchase products. Unless you're a professional painter, chances are you don't need a roller that will last a lifetime...you just want to paint your kid's bedroom with the little money you have and then not think about painting for a few years until you get that promotion and move to a new place. It's not a conspiracy.

This is very true to me because I just painted over the weekend. I got the nice roller pads (purdy brand) and cheap rollers (Lowes), both of them snapped at the handle and rotate around 360 degrees now. This was the second room using them and eventually got the job done, but with lots of frustration. The worst part is this happened the last time I painted. The problem with things that last a lifetime is finding a place to store them.

According to this paper, glass bottles need to be recycled 20 times in order to reach the same CO2 footprint as a PET bottle (UK, assuming a 60% recycling rate for PET): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257679872_Life_cycl...

This is tied up with untold logical fallacies.

In the UK we used to have electric milk floats with milkmen that would deliver milk in glass bottles. The dairy would be local. The cows would be local. Big cities had trains to get the milk in. Or the milk would travel in tankers.

The bottling plant would be for local distribution. The empties would be carried back on the milk float.

Moving on we now have dairies many, many miles away. They are not a common sight. The milk goes into single use plastic bottles and gets sent to supermarket depots. It then travels by road vast distances to supermarkets and convenience stores. People then drive to the supermarket and buy the milk.

I personally preferred the way milk was delivered. I liked the community value of having a milkman. I liked washing the bottles and putting them out for collection. The milk wasn't homogenised then, it had not the same shelf life.

I don't believe that having four pints (2 litres) of milk driven over two hundred miles of roads is that efficient. Particularly when I can see cows out the window. Then, since it is the EU, milk can be driven from Germany. Or in yogurt form over the Alps in a 1000 mile journey.

So at one level the CO2 emissions of glass are higher but driving milk hundreds of miles is where the CO2 problem really is.

From a capitalist perspective everything is now really efficient and the market is working. But when milk was government and cared for that way, there was a lot more employment going on. We could have kept it all local with solar and other renewables powering the milk floats instead of coal. But when those former dairies have been shuttered and sold for housing developments there is no goin back. We are stuck with mega dairies.

Water is even worse. There are lorries driving from the Alps with bottled water. This is plain absurd. There was a time when tap water was as good as it could get.

Beer is different, as are spirits and wines. Beer should be brewed locally and served in glasses that get washed in a public house. But widgets in cans and other tricks have made canned beer fine, what most people drink.

Anyway, saying that plastic is less CO2 than glass is just not fair to all the issues of globalised food.

Of course, you can find sloppiness and bad examples everywhere, but you don't prove the theory by a few examples. Perhaps cars was a bad example. My point was that the Japanese and European carmakers always tried to get better performance out of engines without scarifying fuel efficiency. I am not a European nor an American, but I lived on both continents. Visually ( I don't have a statical proof) Americans use much more plastic and produce more plastic garbage than Europeans. A lot of people in Europe genuinely care about the environment and are ready to sacrifice convenience for the environment, but very few people in the USA are willing to do so. Our office produces several large bags of garbage, and we don't have that many people. I am the only person on the whole floor who uses a glass cup for tea, coffee, and water. A reusable glass cup good for my hormones, good for the environment, and also much more pleasant to drink from. I have to wash it from time to time, which some people may find it inconvenient, as it is a lot easier to fill a plastic cup with water, drink it and throw it in the garbage.