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?
I can’t speak for everything, but I can speak for e-waste. Especially printers. Those things are made cheap as hell, but constructed so you can’t just get off the shelf parts. Being able to take the machine apart, find a replacement for whatever party is broken, install, and reassemble, you might have just bought a new printer for the same cost as the part. It’s almost the same with laptops, phones/tablets, televisions, etc. Brand doesn’t matter, it’s all the same. Right to repair doesn’t mean shit if you can’t even make the repairs.
Where I work any problems with a company laptop or phone it just gets replaced and the original is disposed of. Cheaper that way when you factor in the cost of having components on hand, space to store them, the time to replace them and the premium you’d have to pay for either employing staff with those skills or giving them that level of training.
I repair industrial machinery where it is worth it.
Phonecall and description of the problem: 15 minutes.
Guessing what parts may be broken and seeing if we have them in stock. Loading them into the car with my tools: 30 minutes.
Driving there, costs about 3€ per 10km where I live. Plus my time.
Disassembling and diagnose: minimum 15 minutes.
Replacing the part: best case 15 minutes.
Reassembly and test: best case 15 minutes.
Clean up the mess I made and get all my stuff can in the car: 15 minutes.
Drive back.
Fill in the time card, list replacement parts on invoice and send it: 15 minutes.
You’re looking at two hours plus driving for a job where everything goes right, and then spare parts on top of that.
If you’re doing it yourself you have to add an hour of watching YouTube on how to do it. Ordering the spare part, paying shipping which probably costs as much as the part itself. The job itself probably takes twice as long because it’s the first time you do it. You had to buy a special tool too because you did not have a torque wrench for T20. You maybe ordered the wrong part and have to get another.
At the end of the process you have a thing with all parts but one worn from a few years of use. Who knows what is next to break.
Or you could buy a new one for $500 and not have to worry for a year or two while it’s under warranty.
I’d guess the repair option would look better if you had the same economic status as the person who initially put it together.
Most is economics of scale and mass production; repair is device & damage specific, which does not scale at all. Add exploitation of workers, just in time deliveries eliminating storage costs, the fact that transporting parts for 100 devices takes much more transport volume than 100 devices themselves…
a standout product is the steam deck: every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap. I don’t know how valve did it, but that should be the standard the industry should be aiming at.
Still, even for the Steam Deck as an example, which is probably the absolute closest we can get to the ideal case of the economy of repair, I’ve been hoping to buy every single individual part of the Steam Deck and assemble it into a complete Steam Deck myself for the fun and adventure of doing it myself (as someone who already had experiences repairing laptops), but everywhere I’ve looked it’s always more expensive to buy all individual parts of a Steam Deck, than buying one preassembled and officially sold. And this is not even counting the work hour it will take me to finish the process of building it.
But then again, there’s also the chicken and egg question involved in how exactly we got into a situation like this in our society these days.
Mass production and volume discounting. A circuit board can have hundreds of resistors on it. If yours has one resistor go bad you can buy a new one and replace it. But do you think it’s reasonable for you to get that one resistor for the same unit price as the company that orders a hundred million resistors a month?
For one thing, your one resistor takes about the same amount of labour and shipping costs as a tape reel of 10 thousand resistors (about the size of a dinner plate). So you’re already paying 10 thousand times the unit price on shipping and handling for that one resistor! For a manufacturer it’s not even worth their time to sell you 1 resistor. So you end up going through potentially multiple intermediaries before you can buy just 1. Each level of middlemen adds to the cost for you.
Yeah, there we get into the part where logistics for a lot of spare parts are simply more expensive than for a finished product. You need more storage space, you need more workers for that storage space, you need to keep track of a large amount of inventory, and you cant fully standardize packaging since different parts have different needs when shipped. If you want to make a buck out of that extra work too, we have the situation that the sum of the parts costs less than the parts themselves.
every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap.
That’s part of the problem isn’t it tho? When products aren’t designed to be serviceable, let alone to be serviceable by someone not specialized, and spare parts aren’t easily available (not even at 3rd parties), your only option quickly becomes to just buy a new one.
A few years back I replaced the screen on my Xiaomi Mi5. Parts were okayish to order, and while I did succeed, I wouldn’t have called it doable by someone who’s not afraid to turn their phone into a glorified paperweight. And that’s only gotten worse since then.
Tax the fuck out of products that aren’t repairable but should be.
Not in the least bit true with phones, cars and computers. TVs have gotten extremely cheap compared to what they were when I was coming up, but I’d still take a healthy 1080p panel from 2015 over a born-to-fail $300 4k piece of trash made yesterday.
Basically, quality. We dipped quality into the gutter for quicker turnarounds and cheaper sales. Everything made today is basically shit.
A few reasons.
First, ease of repair isn’t a major reason for people to buy certain products. Because consumers don’t purchase on ease of repair for a lot of products, it doesn’t get prioritized in design. The cost of screws over glue may not be worth it if only a small part of the customer base wants screws.
Second, an OEM supply chain is a cost that a lot of people don’t want to pay. It may be cheaper to replace or refund a product than create a supply chain to fix items.
Exploitation.
People in rich countries have stuff manufactured in countries with a lower living standard, less regulation, nor work safety, no unions, lower wages etc. Same goes for the raw materials all stuff is built out of. If you don’t have to care about anything, you can make everything so much cheaper. As long as this exploitative relationship between rich and poor countries exists, the rich will have access to cheap stuff that doesn’t need to be fixed.
Repairing broken appliances and electronics has different dynamic though. You’re paying a trained professional in a rich country to work for you. That doesn’t come cheap. Even though the parts may be cheap, labor costs a lot. That’s the exact reason why everything is manufactured in poor countries where labor is cheap. See also: planned obsolescence
We’ve been doing this for centuries already. It’s a tradition by now. Global inequality fueled the Dutch East India company, Made England rich etc. Oh, and American cotton plantations too. We’re just getting started with this can of worms.
TIL Lemmy feels strongly about the right to repair and modern manufacturing practices.
Okay, I already knew. It’s on brand for whatever it is we are.
cries in Brexit
I once repaired my dishwasher. It cost me about £50 for a new pump, and many hours working out how to take the dishwasher apart and put it back together again. If I treated this as work, I would have been better off buying a new dishwasher, because I would have been paid more for those hours than the cost of a new dishwasher minus a pump.
Appliances are cheap relative to wages now, and repair still takes a lot of time. That’s the simple answer.
We have to consider why we want to encourage repair: it’s not simply true that we should always prefer to repair for its own sake. We should true to minimise greenhouse gas emissions or the use of resources that can’t be reclaimed, but not to the exclusion of all else.
If we had a carbon tax for example, it would somewhat increase the price of new goods and promote repair. But such a tax would not cause people to repair everything reparable - there would still be reparable items that are not economical to repair. This is a good thing though - if the carbon tax correctly embodies the externalities of producing emissions, then the choice to not repair it is a choice to do something else with people’s time. That time could be used on other productive things - maybe working to replace dirty fossil fuel infrastructure, or working to feed or entertain people, which are all things we want.
If we go the replace route. We should be looking at more refurbished equipment. Instead of an appliance going to a junkyard, a company/service would replace with a returned unit. Then take your broken one, fix/refurb that one and keep the cycle going.
But that takes labor, parts, storage, shipping, etc.
Let’s not forget the quality of the repair work. A lot of people may repair something but do it so poorly that they will have to deal with it again soon or it is unsightly. Repairing things is a skill, and when starting out people will fail or do a poor job.
I do all the repairs at my house. It takes a certain mechanical inclination for some things that many people don’t have.
Even if repair was encouraged it would take time to change how people think. As someone who does repairs I do notice how often people just ask for replacements instead even if it’s just a small easy thing to switch out. I tell them no, I fix it. That said, the things is repair is often fast and done in less than an hour if I have parts already.
Part of the answer here is also integrated design. To be able to be repaired a thing has to be designed for that, and to have identifiable parts that can be adjusted or replaced in isolation, and non-destructive disassembly.
If you have to destroy one part to adjust another, it’s not really repairable. If several functions/components are all one thing then you can’t really replace just the one.
To use a bike as an example, you can exchange wires, brake pads, seats and most other things in isolation, especially the things that are expected to wear out and need replacement. But you’re not going to replace part of your bar tape or frame, because they’re essentially one whole thing.
(Ok, you could probably weld a steel frame if you really wanted to, but I think the intent is readable.)
China fixed this. Or maybe America fixed it for China. Idk. It’s all way above my paygrade. All I know is, you go to any mall, there will be a kid there aged 12-18 willing to fix anything you got for the price of the cab you took to get there.
Also, offshoring production creates a much lower labor cost. Repairing in, let’s say the US, will incur a much higher labor cost.
