I’ve noticed an unintended consequence of the relentless drive for low cost products. We’re getting so good at cutting the costs out of products that it is frequently cheaper to replace something than to repair it. This is great for the consumer but terrible for the environment.
I did some thinking about what’s behind this, and I believe the problem/challenge is rooted in the fundamentals of the situation. Mass production is based on the concept of division of labor – the idea that a group of people can make things faster if they divide up the work and specialize in a particular task, instead of each person trying to build things individually (craftsmen). So a wrench might cost $10 if you buy one of the 1,000,000 made in a full production run, but it would probably cost $100 or more if you tried to make it yourself out of metal.
In this kind of scenario, you’d be crazy to make your own wrench, and you’d probably never even consider repairing a broken one. I’m noticing this in all kinds of things in my life: the shoes I just threw away because the sole came detached, the sprinkler head I replaced because I couldn’t find a replacement for the little broken plastic cover, etc. It’s great that I can get new shoes or a new sprinkler head as inexpensively as I can, but the impact to the environment (when you consider this incentive system on a global scale) is scary.
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