A few decades ago, if you paid good money for a product, say a pair of shoes, or a telephone, you would expect it to last you at least a few years, if not decades. Fast forward to today. Products are produced en masse, as cheaply as possible, with intentionally poor design, so they break quickly, and it is cheaper to buy new, than to repair most items. Worse still, many products are designed to be impossible to fix, even when we want to!
Lots of people recognise this phenomenon is problematic. The planned obsolescence (that is, the intentional design of items to break or become outdated soon after purchase) of everyday items, from clothes to tech, pushes billions of people globally into cycles of overconsumption. Additionally, it requires extraction of raw materials and disposal of (often hazardous) waste on a scale our finite planet simply cannot handle. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Fortunately, there are lots of actions we can take to work our way back to a world where we buy only what we need, products aren’t designed to break, and reuse and repair are the norm!
Not buying products we don’t need, while great, is just the start, we need to go further. In this article, I will explore the actions anyone and everyone can take, from joining a Repair Cafe, to supporting campaigns against harmful advertising, or campaigns for the right to repair. Together, through behavioural change, new laws and industry regulation we can break the cycle of overconsumption we have been pushed into, and imagine and create a world beyond planned obsolescence.
What is planned obsolescence?
Planned obsolescence (sometimes called built-in obsolescence) refers to the concept of deliberately designing products to break, or decline significantly in function, within a set window of time. By building artificial limitations and frailty into a product’s design the producer guarantees that within a period of weeks or months, a ‘new’ product is useless, or obsolete.
This ‘proactive’ strategy ensures that consumers have to buy a replacement product far sooner than if products, whether clothes, tech, homeware, were built to last, or at least, not designed to break. By shortening the lifespan and ‘replacement cycle’ of products, companies create higher ‘demand’ for their product, justifying increased supply, generating increased sales volumes and profits, incentivising them to make lower quality goods. This traps everyone in a spiral in unnecessary consumption.
There are several ways that products can be designed to have built in obsolescence. The most common is contrived durability – whereby items are designed to have a short lifespan, as described above. Examples range from shoes to bluetooth headphones to textbooks. Other methods include systemic obsolescence where, through constant software updates, which aren’t available on older models, an ‘old’ product (no matter how new) is rendered useless (think iPhones, computers).
Another method is prevention of repair – the sale of easily repairable, rechargeable, or reusable items as single-use products by making them impossible to fix, recharge or reuse. This is achieved through sealing products completely during manufacturing such that they are damaged if you attempt to open or repair them, glueing replaceable batteries in place, and making replacement parts unavailable, or so expensive it is cheaper to buy an entirely new product. Prevention of repair is everywhere, from disposable cameras, to disposable vapes, to children’s toys, and printers.
Another key strategy for diminishing the lifespan of products is perceived obsolescence. This is the intentional marketing of new products as superior and more attractive than previous ones, to encourage consumers to view older products as out of date and undesirable, regardless of their functionality. The fashion, car, and smartphone industries regularly employ perceived obsolescence as a psychological tool in marketing strategies, capitalising on products as status symbols to encourage people to buy new items in order to keep up with the latest trends. The rise of companies such as Amazon and more recently Shein, Temu, and Alibaba, and their relentless, ubiquitous advertising on social media, employing hyper-personalised ads, user-generated content, flash sales and ‘aggressive pricing strategies’, has only accelerated the replacement cycle of items, pursuit of maximum convenience and trending styles.
Fortunately, there are lots of ways to get involved and challenge this system at every step of the way, and most of them are very simple!
Demand better: Support campaigns for the “Right to Repair” and a “Circular Economy”
The ‘Right to Repair’ is a global movement to ensure that ‘everyone has the right to fix the products they own’. It aims to expand and improve the right to repair legislation in the UK ‘to cover all consumer products, strengthen design standards and remove barriers to repair for everyone’ (UK Repair and Reuse Declaration).
The right to repair is closely related to the concept of a circular economy, a model of production and consumption in which as much as possible is shared, repaired, reused and recycled before anything is thrown away. As such a circular economy model elongates the replacement cycle of items and undermines planned obsolescence in design.
Given we are creating more products and waste than ever before, it has never been more important to regulate production and provide that as much as possible, is repairable before it is consigned to landfill or burning.
Thanks to the hard work and campaigning of hundreds of individuals, just like you, in 2019 ground-breaking ‘Right to Repair’ measures were introduced in the EU, requiring that common items like lamps, televisions and washing machines must be repairable with ‘common tools’ and requiring manufacturers provide professionals access to repair documentation and spare parts for up to ten years after purchase. This legislation contributed to Apple’s decision to change their charging cables from lightning cables to USB-C, making replacement chargers far easier to access, and meaning the same chargers could be used across multiple products, instead of each requiring its own. In 2022, landmark right to repair regulations were introduced in New York, the first of their kind in the US, after nearly 6000 New Yorkers called on the Governor to support the bill. By 2024, as many as 30 states were considering similar legislation.
In 2024 the European Parliament voted to strengthen the measures of 2019 further, with new rules intended to ‘clarify the obligations for manufacturers to repair goods and encourage consumers to extend a product’s lifecycle through repair’ (EU Parliament News, April 23rd 2024). However, there is still a long way to go, as these rules only regulate a small percentage of consumer items.
In the UK, we need to apply pressure to our government to ensure we are keeping up with EU repair measures post-Brexit. In 2023, Restart launched the UK Repair and Reuse Declaration, urging the UK government to support the Right to Repair. They have compiled this list of how you can get involved to support their campaign:
- Email your MP encouraging them to sign the UK Repair and Reuse Declaration
- If you represent a UK community repair group, a reuse group, an ally group, as well as national organisations or businesses, sign the UK Repair and Reuse Declaration
- Join our community by fixing, sharing skills or organising community repair events
- Follow Right to Repair conversations on our community forum
- Follow Right to Repair Europe, Right to Repair UK and Restart to learn more!
Question Ads: Challenge harmful advertisements in your city
One way to really challenge perceived obsolescence is to free our cities, and ourselves, from the grip of advertising. Though no study is entirely certain exactly how many ads we see in a given day, the estimate is that the average person in the US or Europe is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 every, single, day. That is a lot of adverts for a lot of products; products we probably don’t need, otherwise they wouldn’t need to be so heavily advertised. Indeed, lots of the most advertised products, from fast food to SUVs and air travel are actively bad for our planet and our personal health. Yet, organisations spend millions to understand how best to psychologically manipulate people – or consumers (their word!) – into choosing their products. Cumulatively and insidiously, this barrage of ads create a perception that we ‘need’ to buy new things, to be cool, to be sexy, to be satisfied. What would consumption patterns look like without such a constant bombardment of psychologically targeted prompts?
Organisations like Adfree Cities, Brandalism UK, and Fossil Ad Ban are on a mission to find out. Here’s how you can get involved:
- Join a local Adblock group, working with people in your community to reduce the harmful impact of advertising in your area.
- Follow @badvertising11 , @brandalism, @spellingmistakescostlives, to see how you can use your creativity to highlight the hypocrisy and misinformation of advertising campaigns.
- Lobby your council to commit to banning harmful outdoor advertising in your city. We are seeing more and more cities commit to banning fossil fuels, among other harmful industry ads after concerted campaigns by concerned local residents. For example The Hague voted last September to ban fossil fuels ads in the city, in Edinburgh the same is now true on council-owned billboards in the city, and in Sheffield the ban extends to junk food, airlines, gambling and vaping too. Ask your council to do the same.
- Change your tech settings to block as many ads as possible.
- Email your MP and campaign for stronger national legislation around advertising guidelines.
- Become an ‘Adspotter’- keep an eye out for interesting or misleading advertisements and share them with Adfree cities as part of a citizen science project to see what is being said by who in the advertising world.
- Learn more about how sneaky advertising really is – Badvertising by Andrew Simms is a great book to start with.
Fix more: Join or start a repair café
As noted above, the right to repair is so important, but sometimes it isn’t a spare part stopping us from fixing something, sometimes it’s that we just don’t know how to! Repair Cafes are a brilliant solution to this problem.
Repair Cafes, or Fixing Factories, are community spaces focused on fixing things, together. They have all the tools and materials required for standard repairs to clothes, bikes, appliances, toys, and there are always expert volunteers on hand to teach the skills we might not yet have. In many ways, they are a reversion to how things used to be, when it was commonplace for the owners of objects to simply fix them when they broke. In this age they are therefore both an ode to the past, an experience for the present, and a vision for the future. There are over 5000 Repair Cafes around the world today, hopefully as more and more open up, more and more people will see the appeal and find the joy of repairing the things they already own.
Here’s how to get involved:
- Find and join a Repair Cafe near you! If there aren’t any in your area, why not start your own?
- Learn how to make, and repair your own clothes, either through joining a local craft group or learning to knit, crochet, darn or sew on Youtube – it’s so rewarding!
- Take part in Fix it Feb.
- If you have mechanical or craft skills, volunteer at a Repair Cafe, bike kitchen, or craft group, to teach others how to fix their tech, machines and clothing, and encourage those in your network to learn.
Call out: Make fashion brands behave responsibly
We can all take action to resist and avert the ever growing dangers of fast fashion. Capitalising on fast switching trends, and the power of perceived obsolescence, the most recent estimates suggest that as many as 150 billion clothing garments are being made by fashion companies every year, with 10 to 30 percent of them not even being sold! Many of the remaining percent are worn just once before being thrown away, either because of their poor quality (or contrived durability), or because contemporary trends have moved on (perceived obsolescence). This level of production is crazy – we already have enough clothes on earth, to dress the next six generations. Not only does this have devastating environmental impacts, but those producing these garments are often forced to work in unsafe environments for next to no pay, in flagrant violation of their human rights.
When it comes to fast fashion, yes we need to buy less, but we also need to do more to make this problem go away. We need to secure stricter national and international regulation when it comes to worker safety, minimum wages and transparency about the volumes of clothes being produced and how they are disposed of. Here’s what you can do:
- Nominate a fashion brand to disclose their annual production volumes (#SpeakVolumes), to encourage better transparency and accountability within the fashion industry.
- Support campaigns telling major fashion brands to pay their workers.
- Sign this petition to demand big brands sign the International Safety Award.
- Boycott big fashion brands that refuse to respect their workers’ human rights or take any measures to prevent serious harm to the environment. Instead shop locally, and support independent artists in your area. Yes, the clothes may be more expensive, but they will likely be much better quality, last you much longer, and not contribute to wage slavery or environmental harm.
Buy less …and imagine more
While all the above are incredibly important steps to challenging and chipping away at the planned obsolescence fuelled cycle of hyper-consumerism we exist in today, the easiest thing anyone and everyone can do is, simply, buy less.
We are constantly told to buy material solutions to societal problems. Feeling sad because of anthropogenic climate change, systemic prejudices, or because your elected officials are undermining democracy? Don’t worry, we’ve got a waterbottle/keyring/jumper/journal/house-plant/silly-pair-of-novelty-party-glasses for that. Try saying no.
Imagine, instead, a world beyond this constant thrum of consumption. Look beyond material salves which, for all the above-noted reasons, will probably break soon anyway, and to your community of friends, family and neighbours for support. In need of dopamine? Try making something, food, art, crafts, instead. Through such small anti-consumerist actions, we can create pockets of a world beyond planned obsolescence. Pockets of the place we could arrive at, if we work together to secure the legislation, regulation and protection measures discussed in this article
Be curious
- The next time something you love breaks, be curious, try learning a new skill to fix it before buying a new version.
- Try counting how many adverts you see the next time you’re out and about. If any strike you as particularly odd or amusing, be sure to share them tagging Adfree Cities.
- If you are curious to learn more, why not read Consumed by Aja Barber, Badvertising by Andrew Simms, It’s Not Just You by Tori Tsui, or the fictional The Day the World Stopped Shopping, by J. B. MacKinnon?
Featured image credit: Militiamobiles from Pixabay
The post Imagining a world beyond intentionally poor design and rampant waste, and an action plan for creating it. appeared first on Curious Earth.
