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Comment by DodgyEggplant | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons: Products are not taxed by their environmental real price. If environmental damage incurred with "new" (materials, shipping, disposing the older products after a only a few years) would be calculated in the final consumer price, then durable products, and fixing rather buying new, would be the better consumer option. New products are "cheap" in store, are "cheap" by saving manufacturer need to handle support and fixes, but they are very expensive for the environment.

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There's also the fact that manufacturers want to make a profit, so it is in their interest to make products that last only "long enough" --- too short and people will complain (but gradually change this, and maybe they may not notice), too long and they'll feel like they're losing money. Washing machines, fridges, etc. are a mature technology that has relatively little room for improvement, so unlike e.g. computer hardware that changes at a much faster pace, the manufacturers have to drive consumption somewhat more aggressively. They also make them far (edit: more, not less) unserviceable than before.

I've always detested the "newer is always better" mentality that the population seems to have been conditioned into, and that the culture perpetuates; I think when the only reason you want to buy a new X is because your existing one is "old" (not unfixably broken, not slow, not missing a feature that would really improve your life), there is something seriously wrong.

I wonder how are Chinese white Goods, since the market is new, manufacturers are quite new and consumers are clearly interested in saving money and in durable goods.

Refrigerators have improved quite a bit recently, they use a lot less energy. Gp proposes disposal fees; energy companies pay modest rebates to haul away old freezers and refrigerators.

I think it's a question of information.

People see energy star ratings and Amazon ads, neither of which emphasize lifespan, durability, or repairability. It's like the MHz wars for white goods.

The next level of information is Amazon reviews — generally dominated by people who just bought or don't even own the product... e.g. Nikon and Canon fanboys will go and sabotage the ratings of their arch enemy's products. If you're lucky you sometimes find a review by someone who has owned the product for a whole year.

The ease of price comparison has led to SKU-mutation where the same product is sold in micro variants. This also makes more thoughtful reviews, such as those by Consumer Reports, useless because they can't survey a product field or provide reviews that remain useful for more than a few months (when I subscribed to Consumer Reports I could never find their recommended products on sale -- never).

It's a situation in which rewards two kinds of players — long term brand/relationship builders who try to sell on repeat business based on trust, and short-term commodity-makers who operate on wafer thin margins and think of their product and customer relationship as disposable. Let's say Braun (or one of the other often unaffordably expensive German appliance brands) at one extreme and LG towards the other (there are far worse, LG at least is trying to be a brand).

So it's just like the smartphone wars.

For electronics, some states now require a fee at the time of purchase, to be put into a fund and used for future recycling, so the cost of responsible disposal is built into the original price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee

Its motivation was a different problem, recycling rates: most people balk at paying a fee at the time of disposal to recycle something. If recycling costs money (as it generally does for electronic waste, which doesn't recover enough valuable metals to pay for the process), then people just dump things in the trash instead, even if that's illegal. Collecting the cost of recycling up front, and then making it free to recycle at the point of disposal, greatly increases how willing people are to put their electronic waste into the right bin.

As far as I know that's so far mostly for computers, not appliances, and only in some jurisdictions. How effective it is also depends on how strong the other laws around recycling are: if "recycling" ends up consisting of just shipping the waste to China to be processed in a questionable manner, the up-front price might not be fully pricing in the environmental damage. Overall I think it's a good model, though, to combine responsible-disposal requirements with up-front collection of the funds to do the disposal.

My town has an appliance disposal fee, though I don't know if it's at the level of the true cost. I actually think of it when I'm considering the cost of replacing something.

Anecdote: Just over a decade ago I moved into a house that was empty of appliances thanks to an all too successful estate sale. Literally every single appliance has broken since then, some more than once. I'm lucky that my parents taught me to fix things.

But I remember watching my dad fix appliances, meaning that they weren't 100% reliable back then either. And one thing that might bias my "statistics" is that there are a lot more appliances nowadays. Things that were only barely coming into prevalence while I was growing up: Microwave, home computer, electric toothbrush (yes, I've repaired one), air conditioner (rare in my hometown), various garden implements, etc. Things that don't even need to be an appliance, but are now electric, break.

It's not just about whether appliances need to be fixed, it's also about whether they are serviceable at all. Due to miniaturization and perhaps planned obsolescence, increasingly appliances cannot be fixed at all.

In many white goods, miniaturization to the level that prevents repairs are not necessary.

I think there's some truth to this. It's not just miniaturization, but sometimes components are now so tightly integrated and specialized that failure of one part causes a lot of collateral damage.

At least for "major" appliances, I tend to choose based on my best guess of serviceability. I avoid models that have too much electronics, not because I expect those parts to break, but because the complexity might frustrate diagnosis in the future.

There's a lot of repair information online. People enjoy blogging about their successful repairs. But judging from comments on web forums, I'm guessing that a lot of people doing these repairs are landlords. If you buy 15 dryers, and they all break on the same day for the same reason, you'll have a pretty strong incentive to figure out how to fix them.

There's some debate of this exact issue among musicians who play amplified instruments, as I do. There are now tiny little amplifiers, but if you open them up, it's apparent that diagnosis of the circuits (switch mode power supplies and amplifiers) would be daunting, even for a pretty serious electronics enthusiast. There are players who will avoid these products for this reason. I've decided in that case that I will take the risk of having to replace a module or an entire unit in the future, because the portability is actually a benefit.

> There's a lot of repair information online.

Indeed there is, and one of the sad things is that this proliferation of easy access to information has seemingly not had much effect on the throwaway consumerism of today's culture, nor in getting people to understand more about the machines they use. A service manual is often literally a Google away (even for older models, there are a lot of neighbourly people who digitise them), and although I've not needed to do any major repairs on my white goods, I've collected from the Internet all the information I need to for most if not all of them.

The other is parts inventory and availability. I was renting a house about 14 years ago and the washer from the early 60s finally broke, not the motor the belts or the pump but one of the timing gears in the clock like sequencer that ran the cycles. The landlord simply disposed of the old unit and replaced it with a new way less well built one.

I called tons of GE parts suppliers and they could not procure a sequencer. Now I would just 3d print the one gear that had worn out. :(

Another option to 3d printing (I wonder how well this works for gears on consumer-level printers?), is to print out the gear pattern on label paper, and stick that onto a piece of plexi glass. Then cut out the circular shape, and finally use a triangle file (along with a vice) to cut the gear notches, using the printed label as a guide. I did this once for a gear for an older Okidata dot-matrix printer used for multi-part forms.

That would have worked but I didn't think of it in 2000. That washer could have run another 20 years. kintsugi

It's not just statistical bias. We know things today are made from cheaper materials(plastics instead metal in washing machine) for example, and it makes sense they'll be less reliable.

I don't know about you, but when I have junk like a washer, I haul that sucker down to the scrap yard for cash.

Where it is scraped and mostly recycled.

Is re-use figured into your environmental calculations?

The appliance disposal fee in my locale has prompted the scrap yards to charge a fee, albeit slightly lower than the city fee. ;-(

Wild: When I moved last year I made .. well not a lot but a fair bit hauling my own junk to the scrap yard.

When it was time to scrap the computer equipment I would have profited from that, too, if not for the CRTs. Those I would have been better off throwing them into the landfill.

That's a bold assertion, but based on the fees I see for disposal of real goods, not close to plausible. Adding another $10 onto a washing machine for a "disposal fee" still isn't going to make the $500 washing machine suddenly comparable to the $1100 one. And if you're adding more than about $10, you're not adding an "environmental real price", you're just taxing people because they aren't doing what you want them to do. The environmental "real price" of a washing machine simply isn't in the hundreds of additional dollars.

I agree. Electronics products need to have the incentive to be built to last, rather than built to last only past the warranty time, to force you to buy a new one after that.

If they're cheap, who cares that they don't last past the warranty expiration?

My aunt's first microwave cost a fortune in the early 70s - a month's salary, easy.

I can buy one at Wal-Mart today for $60.

As others said, there's an environmental cost to building "garbage" that breaks down early, and then we need new ones to replace them.

Sure, there is a cost. Which is offset by recycling.

If we all switched, tomorrow, to using long-lived appliances and goods, we'd pay higher costs for _new_ manufactured goods because their a whole lot of their inputs comes from recycled material.

Example: a metal foundry in my home town makes a whole lot of man-hole covers (and like goods). They exclusively use recycled metal. The car that I scrapped last week could be part of a manhole cover next month!

I suppose there is another aspect to buying a $60 item that may last three years compared to a $200 one that may last nine years. That means increased production, employment for manufacturing/sales/marketing, and when it stops working, similar benefits to the re-cycling industry and the employment therein. Keeps the "wheels turning".

Truthfully, I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad being the catalyst of that wheel.

Be happy. The printer you had to buy last month to replace the printer you bought last year because the toner costs _more_ than a new printer is a lot better than the one you had three years ago.

There is this: the toys we're making now are more efficient, easier on the environment, produce less waste in manufacturing and operation, and are even easier to part out for recycling.

By all means, keep driving that '57 Chevy around. But you're better off, and _we_ are better off, if you drive a late-model car.

If we start making manhole covers that last, it will raise the prices of all manhole covers sold! -- People for Thin Bendable Manhole Covers

My point, you missed it.

Currently, the incentive is to be build not to last. There is an interesting documentary on this subject called "The light bulb conspiracy" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfbbF3oxf-E

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