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 feel like this movement could move toward the anti-natalist movement, since thats the best way to prevent unending humanity growth. People don’t want to realize that though. Not saying it’s good or bad.
I would strongly disagree, half the reason AI is being so pushed right now is big business wants to extract growth regardless of how many people are employed and how many people are alive. There is no logical reason to be an anti-natalist, when the problem is quite clearly capitalism, not the amount of people, that’s just rebranded Malthusianism.
I probably agree, I don’t know too much on the subject really.
Also, offshoring production creates a much lower labor cost. Repairing in, let’s say the US, will incur a much higher labor cost.
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.
Tax the fuck out of products that aren’t repairable but should be.
Building a thing is very simple, generally speaking. There’s a stream of uniform parts that come into the factory, each exactly what’s needed, and they are put together in a precisely designed routine. It can be trained for quickly and done with minimal skill, by people who live in a low-wage country.
Repair, on the other hand, is very complicated. You need to deal with all the unknowns of figuring out what’s wrong, you need to find the replacement parts from scratch (if they’re even available), and the steps required to replace bits are made up as you go. You might need to desolder connections or remove rivets that were never meant to be removed. Lots more work.
Frankly, I’m not sure it should be encouraged in all cases. Prices really do reflect the value of things in a lot of cases; it may indeed be better to recycle an old broken item and buy a new one to replace it.
As long as we live in a capitalist society industries will trend twoards monopolies and monopolies will implement planned obsolescence to make more money.
Let’s take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer’s description of what is wrong, and you’re prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you’re confident in your diagnosis.
Your typical job looks like this:
- Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
- Drive out to the person’s home (30 minutes).
- Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
- Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
- Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
- Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
- Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
- Drive back to your office (30 minutes).
There, that’s 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn’t need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn’t have had to remove an old one.
Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn’t have to waste too much time driving from place to place.
Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you’re also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.
The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn’t until you’re up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.
For $500 devices, it’s gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.
This assumes that the owner hasn’t already attempted to repair it themselves
The point still stands. It takes a while to figure out how to repair something you have never repaired before. This assumes the person have the right tools at hand as well, and the correct replacement part.
Compare with a factory worker. They have assembled the same microwave thousands of times. They got everything they need at hand.
I was implying that the owner might have broken it even more when attempting the repair, making it take even longer.
Mostly because my washer started leaking and I’m probably going to break it more, too
But you might fix it - and if you break it more it was already broke so no loss
Old products were made so that each product lasted as long as possible.
So when one part failed, it was worth repairing because the rest was probably fine.
Modern products are designed to last X amount of time, so when one part fails, the rest of it is likely to fail soon.
Making repair not worth it.
You’re trying to treat this as one problem, but it’s specific depending on what you need. Like, you can 100% buy a fountain pen instead of using cheap disposables. But I doubt that’s what you’re talked no about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
