How long do you keep your mobile phone? TV? Printer? Dishwasher? Decades ago purchases of these sizes might have been considered to last the best part of a lifetime, but in recent years the trend to quickly replace goods mean they might last a year or two at best.
Take mobile phones for example. Around 25 million phones are sold every year in the UK. If you consider the adult population of the UK is around fifty million that means more than half the population are replacing their phone every year. It’s an indication of a culture than increasingly views objects as disposable. This is not the single use definition of disposable that we may be used too, for example the paper plate that lasts just a meal but the principle is the same, just on a different time scale. When we tend to buy a product it rarely lasts as long as it should or could and pretty soon the object becomes obsolete.
There are two major ways this can happen, planned and perceived obsolescence.
Say a car manufacturer is designing a new car. After designing, tooling, machining, testing, marketing and advertising a huge amount has been spent putting the model out before the first car has even been produced. To recoup this money and make a profit they need to have the car on sale for a certain number of years. After a while it will be replaced with a whole new line as sales start to decline. If the car is still on sale for say ten years it’s clearly not going to sell very well if it starts to fail within those ten years. But when the car is taken off market what need does the manufacturer have that the car should really last much longer or still be desirable? In fact the sooner the car is replaced the sooner the manufacturer will have another potential customer. Often replacement parts are prohibitively expensive, encouraging the consumer to buy again as opposed to repair goods.
Objects we buy are not designed to last extended periods of time, simply so we have to keep on buying them. This is what is known as planned obsolescence. MP3 players whose batteries stop holding charge over a few years and printers that stop working after a short time are examples. If you buy these items sustainabily in the first place then this could limit the environmental impact when it comes to the end of their usable lives. The technology in a washing machine has not changed that much in the last 30 years (things spin, soap and water are added, clothes get clean) but who has a washing machine over five or ten years old? There are two reasons for this, the first is due to planned obsolescence; the washing machine may well not last five years anyway, but the second is more subtle, after five years we just might want a new one. This is something called perceived obsolescence.
Perceived obsolescence is the process by which a product that you own is made to seem obsolete. The new must have phone, the seasons must have colours – all designed to make your perfectly good items you already own seem out dated. And what do you do when you’ve got an out dated product? Well, buy a new one of course. What you had already worked perfectly, but social, cultural and advertising pressure means that as a society we feel compelled to keep on buying the most current items out there. As a society we are coerced into being repeat consumers, regardless of the environmental cost.
Aldous Huxley’s novel A Brave New World tells of a fictional future dystopia where the population are brainwashed to buy as many goods as possible, and not to make do with what they have. “Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches” [1] is one of the mantras of the age. The novel was written in 1931, an era when a coat or jacket would be repaired if broken, and then passed down to family members if outgrown. Now a damaged jacket would in all likelihood be thrown away, as wearing a coat that you have obviously mended just isn’t done. This hasn’t been achieved via brainwashing, at least not in the conventional sense; cultural, media and advertising pressures have done this job.
Economies boom when populations spend. One of the first actions the British government did after the 2008 recession was lower VAT rates from 17.5% to 15% in an effort to increase the public’s spending [2]. Increasing the rate we consume products was deemed so important the loss of 2.5% of governmental revenue from VAT was seen as a small price to pay for keeping people buying products.
If spending creates wealth in the short term it also causes long term environmental issues. It is becoming clear that the Earth simply cannot sustain production of certain goods at the current rate we are making them. The cost to the environment comes on many fronts. The Earth’s mineral resources are finite, and manufacturing and transporting good entails a high carbon cost so every step of the chain contributes to global warming. The water footprint (that is the amount of water needed to make a product) of new goods is another huge consideration. For instance for every kg of cotton that goes into a new pair of jeans 3644 kg of water will have gone into making that cotton [3].
There’s also the question of where we put all our newly obsolete goods. Many of the goods we replace each year are non biodegradable meaning we either need to recycle them (which is not always possible), put them in rapidly overfilling landfills or incinerate them causing airborne pollution.
To mitigate against serious environmental damage to this planet our society needs to modify its behaviour. This needs to be more than just a token effort of living a little greener by turning off lights or trying to fly a little less but a deep seated shift in the way we view resources, commodities and consumerism. What is certain some point the Earth will run out of its capacity to support our current way of living and our lifestyle will have to change. The question for society is if we will have the foresight to change our lifestyles now or if this change will be forced upon us.
1. Huxley, A. (1932) A Brave New World, Chatto and Windus: London
2. HM revenue and Customs (2008) Vat – Changes In The Standard Rate: A Detailed Guide For Vat Registered Businesses.
3. AK Chapagain, AY Hoekstra, HHG Savenije, R. Gautam. (2006) The water footprint of cotton consumption: An assessment of the impact of worldwide consumption of cotton products on the water resources in the cotton producing countries. Ecological Economics, Vol. 60, No. 1. (2006), 186-203
