I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that’s a step to the right direction. Still I’m left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it’s often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
It’s in large part a problem of scale. Manufacturers buy parts in quantities so large that their per part cost is relatively tiny. Doubly so for Chinese manufacturers, because of currency conversion. If you as an individual want to buy one or two parts for a repair, it’s not profitable for companies to sell you those small quantities unless they charge what is sometimes exponentially more.
Buy a TV and crack the LCD, the new LCD will cost 90% of the price, and then you need to throw in labor. Let’s say $100. That’ll cover an hour of their time and the shops time because they first have to verify the model, talk to a vendor, get it shipped, then install it and deal with the drop off holding contacting you for pick up and payment processing. After paying the workers, maybe they made $50 off that repair if they are always busy. If a part is DOA, more costs. Total it all up and realize you spent $550 to repair a TV that is on sale with a 1 year warranty for $499 at Walmart with no waiting.
Assembly lines make things cheap, especially if the labor is cheap
Yep. Add to that, they give things short lifespans these days - for instance with cars, many of the cuffs and pumps and moving parts are now plastic because they assume car = 10 years. So the internal quality has gone downhill, it’s cheaper than ever to manufacture new, but taking a 10 year old car and replacing every plastic part with another plastic part that will also fail would cost a small fortune… just buy a new car. They very much assume you’ll be landfilling and rebuying in no time. Reparability went away when we became a disposable society.
Purpose-built automation increases the manufacturing capacity, making the scale even larger than it used to be. It also means the control circuitry can be made very compact and highly integrated. So there’s individual components failing are harder to identify and replace, and they can handle multiple functions so the device is notably more broken than and older device might have been when a component fails.