I love it when people are so brutally honest about their own work.
Sadly, the best solution is for corporations to make more robust, high-quality, long-lasting, expensive, products.
i.e. Make less money, and do better work.
So...who's first at bat?
I'm not really in the mood to discuss whether or not government regulation has any hope of doing so here, since there's a much-too-common inability to look beyond the dysfunctional US political system that is just too tiresome to discuss around on a Monday morning.
But I will say on a meta-level that one way or another this must involve some form of politics, because fundamentally it's about humans trying to bring out desired human behavior.
Similarly, suggesting that there are situations where the cost function is both necessary and has such a high constant overhead that you're better off with a non-market system is a non-starter half of the time.
Let's say you've inherited a small fortune that includes a mansion. The mansion's upkeep is slowly eating away the fortune. What do you do? You can rationally make some scenarios how to deal with it. Maybe you sell it. Maybe you rent it out. Maybe you invest in it and start a hotel.
It doesn't really matter which industry sector does the improvements as long as the total improves. Doing it with free market ensures that they happen where they are cheapest.
Might be technically tricky to accomplish in a world where most manufacturing happens overseas, though.
Unfortunately we’ll also have to deal with IKEA style tactics of converting a single company into a complex web of disposable sub companies in order to dodge their tax or regulatory obligations.
Regarding your second point, don't we already have to do the latter anyway?
Now, I say this, owning and still using a Toastmaster Toaster which is older than myself; all my dinnerware and glassware is older than most people along with desk lamps now using LEDs but were produced in the 30s; but the point is people don't put any effort into taking care of items because for many they have reached the point of disposable.
Then when it comes to tech its not reliability but marketing has become so good people are quite willing to toss perfectly working items for the latest and greatest. Hell people do this with cars and anecdotally from a coworkers spouse who works in a home renovation company they toss perfectly good large appliances too.
I grew up in Africa, and was exposed to people without a pot to piss in, making things last waaaaaayyyy beyond their "sell by" date.
If I remember, Apple recently took a hit on their iPhone bottom line, because people are no longer getting a new phone every year.
Oh they do, they really do. I worked at a recycling factory in the UK, the amount of household appliances, TVs, computers and computer parts, laptops, phones that people toss away is staggering.
Many are in absolutely perfect working condition! Like, a 48" Samsung TV and a 52 inch 4K Sony TV would come in, we'd test them, nothing wrong with them. I can only assume someone moved house and just left everything, or they upgraded to bigger TVs.
Not even going to mention the washers, dryers, dishwashers, fridges, about a quarter of them would be in good working condition. Who throws away a perfectly fine washer? Why? A new model has nothing new inside technology-wise, I can promise you that.
It was against company policy, but employees would take them home, either for a low price (got myself a nice Neff microwave oven and a Bosch vacuum for £10 each... retail price in the hundreds) or just by being friends with a supervisor...
I'm actually glad about that, because otherwise they'd be loaded into containers and sent to Asia or Africa somewhere. Absolutely ridiculous.
When I first moved in my house I didn't have a job, so I bought a lot of cheap appliances. Most of them still work, and I expect them to keep on working with almost no maintenance for years to come. However, they have some serious downsides: they are energy inefficient, they make a lot of noise, and they do not necessarily fit my future needs.
For example, now that I have a partner, my fridge is a bit small. And instead of running the washer once every two weeks, we're running it two or more times a week. Every time I run the washer, the floor the washer is on becomes basically unlivable for about half an hour or so due to loud noise of the centrifuge.
I do not want to buy new stuff, particularly because the old stuff "still works". And getting rid of my old stuff in a nice way is not easy either: Because they have wear and tear, goodwill and second-hand shops are not overly enthusiastic about taking them from me. Unless I can find someone to take something over (for free!), I am left with moving it to the recycling place because I do not have any storage space in my house.
The cheaper models are the ones that go straight to scrap, because they're unfixable - poor electronics with no water protection, low quality bearings and drum spiders that fail catastrophically (and the drums are welded instead of using bolts = unfixable) and counterweights that simply crumble.
I get it when they break and there's no other choice but to chuck them. But throwing away good appliances is just unthinkable for me. I use them all until they fail, fix them and use them some more, until they're unfixable :D
Worst case, I'd try to sell them for cheap or give them to someone who needs them, there's plenty of people in every country.
The efficiency of washers and dishwashers has been the same for about two decades now. There's simply nothing that can be improved inside.
Dryers have had a decent improvement with heat pumps, other than that, it's the same design that's been around for decades.
The reason it matters lies with a desk lamp is because you probably aren’t still running incandescent bulbs in it.
They would regularly "crush" out-of-date equipment (like stuff that had passed its market prime, so the sales and marketing folks no longer needed it). By "crush," it meant taking the equipment to an old quarry, and smashing it with a sledgehammer.
Apparently, this was necessary for a tax write-off.
It was painful as hell, as most of the equipment was perfectly fine. It included things like bodies and lenses, still worth thousands.
The environment would likely be in worse shape if we were all still using CRT monitors, plasma TVs, old A/C units, incandescent lightbulbs, cars from the 70s.
Hm, seems to contradict this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
Here I see energy consumption going straight up.
It leaves me wondering if the book (which I admittedly won't be reading; my existing reading list is already long enough) ends up functioning a bit like that satirical paper on smoking and long distance running from 10 years back. In it, the authors "convincingly" argued that marathon runners should all be smokers. The overall structure was a sort of numeric Gish Gallop: the paper focused on a constellation of individual measurements that are plausibly associated with both smoking and long distance running performance, while carefully steering clear of any measurement of smokers' actual athletic performance.
Far too many people are locked into the consumerism cycle, that we must improve the things we consume and consume more of them, because "more good" must be the same as "better overall", right?