It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.
Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world. If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke, Lenovo should pay the cost of disposing (or repairing) it and bringing the environment back to the condition it was in before the product existed. When my car dies, Toyota should have to tow it away, part it out and reuse what it can. We've somehow normalized the idea that companies can just externalize these real disposal costs onto the public and environment.
(however, both of those schemes don't put everything back directly - which would be inefficient. They allow delegation by paying recyclers. This can result in "carbon offset" like shenanigans.)
> If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke
Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price.
Incidentally you should also be able to modify the laptop as you want, or if you lack the skills, pay said 3rd party repair shops to do it for you.
>Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price.
You already can, it's just often not economically viable in high-income countries. Lenovo have a very comprehensive parts service and provide useful service manuals.
Ironically, Apple devices are the most widely repaired by third-party specialists despite Apple's strenuous efforts to make that difficult, because they're expensive and depreciate slowly.
As someone who is adept at electronic repair, I am absolutely certain that it's overwhelmingly because of high labour costs. I fix my own stuff for the fun of it, but there's no way I'd do it for a living because there are just much better uses of those skills in the modern economy. Just look at the prices for old electronics on eBay or Facebook Marketplace - unless the item is very recent, repair doesn't offer good value to the owner or a viable margin for a recycler.
People used to darn holes in their socks, but that's an eccentric hobby in a world where you can buy perfectly good socks for less than $1 a pair.
It's still a factor in the developing world. Those awful scenes of e-waste being melted down for scrap in open pits are symptomatic of the fact that a lot of devices just aren't worth fixing or dismantling for spare parts, even at third-world labour rates.
Manufacturing is heavily automated, which is the reason why you can buy a toaster or a clock radio for less than $10; without massive advances in robotics and AI, the only similarly automated end-of-life solution for those items involves a shredder and a furnace. Here in the EU, the manufacturer is responsible for bearing the end-of-life costs for electronic devices, but it doesn't really change the economics.
Making the company responsible for the entire lifetime of a product also makes them effectively own the product. Your idea sounds a lot like renting from the producer.
Said responsibility can remain the choice of the consumer: producer must accept repair/replacement if consumer brings it back to them, but consumer is not forced to bring it back to them if anything goes wrong. Consumer may also choose to self-repair, sell, etc. Perhaps consumer must bring it back to dispose of it though, as nobody benefits from hucking it directly into a landfill.
The other difference between "renting" from the producer is that the producer isn't collecting any rent, only initial purchase.. and that producer cannot claim the item back whenever they please.
This is a fair and valid view of looking at things. Though the trick is to not get too heavy handed. At what point does regulation become too stifling ?
The American way is to possibly put too few responsibilities on manufacturers. The European way seems to be to saddle them with just too many regulations -- possibly killing so much innovation.
One way to approach this would be to put more responsibilities on large established companies and less on smaller companies. But then the problem is that larger companies will want to arbitrage this somehow by indirectly "owning" these smaller companies with less environmental responsibilities.
This area is far more complex than we think it is.
Also what do we do about totally new materials that are thought to be benign when introduced but then are proved to have harmful effects many years later. Does the company that introduced them now have huge open ended costs and now go bankrupt ?
The solution is as always in the middle ground. Society as a whole bears some cost of cleanup (a kind of insurance policy for all companies) and companies bear some of costs.
Here in Norway, electrical and electronic (EE) goods are taxed extra and that money goes to recycling and cleanup[1].
Importers and producers are required to be a member of a approved company handling returns, like RENAS[2].
Shops selling EE goods are required to accept returned EE goods from individuals of the type they sell. So if you sell fridges you have to take my old fridge and handle it in accordance with the rules.
Seems to work better than nothing, though how well I don't know. As with all such regulations there's money to be made by skipping steps, and some do[3].
This is a good design. The company that manufactures the product does not need to be necessarily responsible for the cleanup. The cleanup is done by another company and the costs are added on customer checkout. But this is open to abuse as you mentioned -- some companies may take short cuts or the cleanup companies may become an oligopoly and charge unreasonable prices that add a lot of cost to the products.
Also, what happens if you order a product online from another company in a different country ? Does Norway still get to add tax for cleanup on these imported goods ? I would guess that this would be a powerful incentive for customers to skirt these regulations for lower prices.
> Does Norway still get to add tax for cleanup on these imported goods ?
If you import as a private person AFAIK no. Consumers have very good consumer protection on goods bought from domestic shops, so there's a strong incentive to do that rather than import.
Though all that Temu junk is another story...
But companies importing EE goods have to report to the return company they're a member of, and pay them accordingly.
Can't recall offhand if there's special "flag" on the import declaration or if they just go by HS code. And presumably they get audited on this.
IIRC it used to be more directly linked to the import declaration but they streamlined it.
> there's money to be made by skipping steps, and some do
You must be joking.
"Fifteen major car manufacturers have been fined almost €600 million by the European Commission and the British government after Mercedes-Benz blew the whistle on a cartel that fixed car recycling costs and processes." https://www.dw.com/en/eu-and-uk-fine-carmakers-millions-over...
> The American way is to possibly put too few responsibilities on manufacturers. The European way seems to be to saddle them with just too many regulations -- possibly killing so much innovation
Well that's what the European way is lol. Tax and regulate instead of focusing on the crux of the problem, which is overproduction and planned obsolescence. Any solution that uses taxes and extra charges will simply pass the costs onto the consumer.
I like the idea of putting the onus on companies to get rid of the product, but there should be a consumer onus too. Consumers should be discouraged from tossing everything to the landfill, and companies should be forced to collect the stuff they product after the lifecycle is complete. This might even drive the companies to revise their designs to use more recyclable materials.
A good way to penalize planned obsolescence would be to charge a decreasing penalty if the goods are recycled/disposed earlier. So if I return the fridge for recycling after a couple of years (bad fridge) then the company gets charged automatically 5% of the fridge cost. If I recycle after 10 years then the company gets charged zero (as an example).
Maybe instead of a charge this could be a credit. If the recycling happens after a long time the company gets a bigger payback than if it happens before. The money is collected on checkout so the company can't claim bankruptcy or low profits to make the payment.
> So if I return the fridge for recycling after a couple of years
Here in Norway consumers enjoy a 5 year warranty on products that are meant to last, and 2 years on other non-consumables.
So if my fridge dies due to a manufacturing flaw within 5 years, the store I purchased it on has to repair free of charge, replace it with an equal or better product, or give a full refund. If the product keeps breaking in the same way, the customer can demand a full refund.
And it's up to the store to convincingly argue it's not a manufacturing flaw if they don't want to do that.
This provides similar disincentive to import crappy goods.
Well there's the issue innit? You're not placing fault on the manufacturer of the shoddy goods, but on the stores, which I presume are the local distributors?
Sure, you're disincentivizing crappy goods, but then you'd also barr a strata of society who can only afford those crappy goods. While it's not as much of a problem in Norway I suppose, it is a problem in the majority of the world.
I don't think the Norway example is relevant. We are talking about a country that produces oil for more than a thousand dollars a month per person, including old people and babies. It is literally a country where EVERY person is a millionaire from oil money alone. So they can set the most failed policies and make them work.
but ryandrake's comment might be the solution to what trump/republicans/rust-belt wants:
1. employment-rate for Americans.
2. bringing back industrial capacity in US.
If large companies are forced to recycle/repair INSIDE USA, that ultimately means employment for Americans, and bringing back industrial capacity back to US.
(which could mean forcing Chinese manufacturers settings up whole industrial complexes in US...)
btw, this would be a much easier/lesser-side-effect measure than "tariff on everyone" situation
> Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world.
Where I live, you pay a "removal fee" when buying electronics or appliances for just that. If you're buying a new washing machine for example, the party delivering your device is obligated to take the old one with them.
Of course, that's only part of it, your country also needs to have good waste processing and ideally not export it.
I don't know where he is from, but we have something very similar here in BC, Canada. It covers mostly electronics, but we also have a large appliance program which is similar.
Basically you just drop them off at your local recycling center, and they have a program that ensures they go to an audited recycler. There is a small fee when you buy electronics that pays for the program.
what about people who don't care for the products they own. Why should it be Toyota's responsibility for lazy people who don't even do basic maintenance?
Pretty much every product becomes trash at some point, maintenance only changes the timescale.
Something somewhat similar is already law in germany and works rather well. There is no reason society should have to pay for expected costs for disposing a company's products - as this would only incentivize companies to care even less about the difficulty of recycling/disposal.
Please don't define everything in India in terms of poverty. It gives the impression that anything good in India happens only because of economic concerns. But that isn't entirely true. Let's not undermine the recognition of those who do it as a social responsibility. I'm personally acquainted with a rather successful engineer and businessman who does it because he believes in sustainability. His reworked Thinkpads are very popular among the tech community here - not because they're cheap, but because of his workmanship and configurability (it even comes with coreboot). And none of those customers are incapable of affording high-end laptops either - many are FOSS contributors when they're not at their full-time jobs.
I know you are making a flippant and pointless comment, but I’m compelled to respond.
Of all the laptops I’ve owned my 2020 MacBook Air is still my personal daily driver, my 2010 Mac mini still works fine for running my 3d printer, my 2014 Mac mini works great for crafting and my 2020 iPhone SE2 is still getting OS updates and is sending this message.
Are they repairable? Not easily. Do they still work, absolutely. Having used a bunch of non apple laptops and devices at home and work I would say the Apple products last at least 2x as long before breaking or hitting enforced obsolescence.
My 2020 Walmart-brand Motile M141 is still my main personal laptop. I have another Thinkpad T460s (2016) that still works fine. My wife still uses her 2019 Surface Pro. I have an ASRock Vision 3D (2010) in my closet running some SDRs. I've got a Supermicro X11SBA-LN4F (2016) in an old Shuttle SFF chassis (2009). And that's just the old stuff that still gets regular use.
Aside from the Surface tablet they're all very repairable.
I disagree that Mac things tend to last longer. There might be trash out there, but there's tons of stuff that's just fine and lasts a long time. You don't even need to always spend a lot on it; that Motile was like $300 for a 14" 1080p laptop.
Yeah I'm in the same boat. I have a MacBook Pro 2009 that still works fine. That is 16 years old! I use it for web browsing occasionally, although I do have to update the certs manually.
Only downsides are it has only 2GB of RAM and about 0.1 seconds of battery life.
When I bought a new one, I made sure to get 32GB of RAM. That way I'll still be able to browse the web in twenty years, although I'm sure it'll be very slow because of the CPU.
I'm pretty sure you'll find individual Tesla owners who haven't yet had any issues, but their poor track record in terms of reliability and repairability remain.
Stop encouraging companies who lock you out, stop renting products you should fully own!
Locking things down is simply a hidden subscription in the shape of repairs and replacements. When you stop paying the subscription (stop repairing, stop upgrading), that's also approximately when the rental stops working (car, iphone, etc).
I'm sure the percentage of broken to working devices is a carefully monitored R&D output, to maximise profit and retain customer trust from renters such as yourself.
I have two 2013 MacBooks - an Air with 8GB of RAM and a Pro with 16GB. I use them daily. Both work way smoother (with outdated software even) than my friends' few years old Windows 11 laptops. You'd be surprised how much you can get done on that 8GB when the OS isn't using half of it for the News Sidebar Webview and Windows Update/Telemetry services.
Also, the keyboards are both fully functional -- that is, after 12 years of daily coding on them. I didn't buy extended warranty, and the laptops have survived some wild stuff. Where I do agree with you is that the newer ones seem to be of worse build quality. But overall? Pretty damn decent devices.
I agree with the basic premise of your argument. The reason why I dislike certain products like Apple's is because of my professional background in electronics. But the way you presented it is definitely not the way to do it - flipping people off most certainly won't convince people to reconsider their ways. Instead, if people could see the economic and environmental damage cause by such consumerism in person, I'm sure that many would have a change of heart. It just doesn't hit you until you see for yourself what you're contributing to.
