The deliberate designing of products to fail prematurely or become out-of-date by the manufacturers, often to sell another product or an upgrade – a practice that is barred in some countries. Some manufacturers also restrict consumers’ ability to repair their products – by using digital locks or copyrighted software, using incompatible screws or gluing components together, or by refusing to share their repair manuals. Some add clauses to their user agreements so people (often unknowingly) agree not to fix their own products. Although sometimes this is within the law, as consumers purchase more connected products their expectations of what they can and can’t do with a product they have bought are challenged.
Planned obsolescence can cost people a total of up to 50,000 euros during their lifetimes.
For consumers this means their products don’t last as long as they could, and even small problems have to be dealt with by an approved repairer – sometimes at greater expense, distance and delay, especially if they don’t want to invalidate the warranty. This is an inconvenience for many, and one which arguably hits poorer and geographically isolated consumers harder.
The lifespan of electronic goods is becoming shorter, with the number of defective appliances replaced within five years increasing from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2013. At the same time, with increasingly smarter tech, such as that used in phones, e-waste and resource requirements increase with each new model. Not to mention the danger to health associated with the kind of recycling of components that takes place in the informal sector, particularly in developing countries.
Planned Obsolescence can be accomplished in a plethora of ways. It can be accomplished via software update, parts designed to fail after warranty, made un-fashionable, inability to buy replacement parts, unreasonable repair costs, deliberately inefficient design, incompatibility with new or previous products, and a lengthy warranty process. I’m sure there are more examples but these are the few that come to mind.
Here are a few items that most are familiar with that are designed to fail or become obsolete: Textbooks, Cars, video games, Light-bulbs, ink cartridges, Smartphones, laptops, MP3 players, various software, printers, appliances and a host of other materials and objects.
- Ink cartridges have been designed with chips within them that limit the number of print jobs that can be accomplished regardless of the amount of ink left within them.
- Video Games are often made to keep you from being backward compatible. This results in the need for more controllers, games, parts and other ancillary items across multiple platforms.
- Textbooks are updated more often than they really contain new information. Publishers often change the order of information within the book to make it difficult to follow along with newer versions. This results in an inability to use previous books and forces students that have no other choice, to buy new books that contain little or no new information.
- Software is similar to video games in that backwards compatibility is rare. A new year requires a new Operating system and with it, new compatible forms of software. Sometimes software is deliberately designed to run slower with newer Operating systems in order to encourage the consumer to purchase a newer version. The need for newer software often leads to the need for newer more powerful hardware.
- Light-bulbs have been designed to fail after a pre-determined number of hours. Ask yourself how a light-bulb invented by Thomas Edison over 100 years ago is still working in a museum, but the light-bulb you bought last year just burnt out and needs to be replaced?
- Cars fall victim to planned obsolescence by design, an inability to purchase replacement parts and in some cases basic maintenance is made nearly impossible through cost or an inability to obtain parts. An instance that comes to mind is that on a ford Focus you must replace the airbox in order to replace the first air filter. This turns an $11 dollar job into a $250 dollar job and forces you to replace an entire section of the vehicle that you would otherwise not replace for the life of the vehicle.
- Consumer electronics such as cell phones and MP3 players fall victim to trickery within the battery as well as other forms of planned obsolescence. Batteries are designed to fail after a pre-determined number of cycles. Replacement batters are sometimes impossible to obtain or gain access to and are sometimes priced just below the price of replacing the entire unit.
In December 2017, it was found that Apple was deliberately ‘throttling’ – slowing down and turning off features in older models of its phones. They claim this will ensure the batteries function better and the phone won’t turn off suddenly. But others suspect it is a strategy to push consumers towards a new upgrade. Now French prosecutors, following lawsuits from users in the US and Israel, are investigating Apple over the allegations under the country’s law against planned obsolescence. Italy’s antitrust organisation is also investigating both Apple and Samsung for the same issue. Against this backdrop, Apple announced it would allow throttling to be turned on and off on its phones.
Planned obsolescence is a serious environmental problem for the planet. Every year, up to 50 million tons of electronic waste are generated, a very high percentage of which – around 85% – is usually discarded randomly, ending up in waste tips in developing countries, creating a risk for the environment and the health of people, animals and plants. To combat planned obsolescence, which is also costly to consumers who have to renew their products more often, several initiatives exist, including a European Union directive, certification for the prolongation of product lifetimes, and specific NGO programs.
After years of lobbying, the problem of planned obsolescence gained ground in Europe’s legislative arena when, on 4 July 2017, the European Parliament approved its Resolution on a longer lifetime for products: benefits for consumers and companies. Thanks to this act, users of electronic devices will be able to repair their terminals with any service provider simply, without the need to resort to the manufacturer’s official technical service. The directive also includes fiscal incentives for products based on quality, durability and ease of repair.
This directive aims to reduce the quantity of electronic waste each EU country generates and challenges head on the current trend among manufacturers of introducing designs and components that are increasingly difficult to repair or replace without specialist tools. In addition to European legislation, some countries are also creating their own legal frameworks to anticipate planned obsolescence. The best-known case is in France, where, after a drawn-out political battle, fines of up to 300,000 euros and prison terms of two years can now be slapped on manufacturers who plan for their devices to stop functioning after a time.
ISSOP is a mark awarded by Spain’s FENISS (Foundation for Energy and Sustainable Innovation Without Planned Obsolescence) certifying that companies produce environmentally-respectful goods and services, without planned obsolescence, preferably by fair trade, contributing to emissions reduction and correct waste management. Companies such as Casio, SostreCívic and Scanfisk Seafood carry this mark. In the case of fish product company Scanfisk Seafood, for example, the ISSOP mark was awarded in 2016 for its invention of a refrigerator operating with renewable energy and that recycles leftover water, and the fact that the device and its components are repairable and upgradable without planned obsolescence.
In response to planned obsolescence, Spanish NGO Amigos de la Tierra (part of “Friends of the Earth” International) launched an initiative, Alargascencia, against obsolescence, advocating the greatest possible prolongation of the useful life of products through the buying, sale, rent and exchange of second-hand goods. For this, it has created a network of establishments that serve as a meeting point to swap unneeded objects and also repair them, thus avoiding the need to buy new ones. “Amigos de la Tierra” is not the only NGO to take on planned obsolescence. Greenpeace has also launched a campaign to promote the better repair of mobile devices, as an antidote to the current tendency to be buying new ones all the time.
Consumer and user organizations are forming a common front against the abusive practice, pointing out that 99% of our products are planned to be obsolete before their time, something that on average will cost people between 40,000 and 50,000 euros during their lifetimes. The organizations claim that electro-domestic items, for example, are currently made to last between two and 12 years, yet are made from materials that should comfortably remain useful for half a century at least. And tackling planned obsolescence is not only a battle against abusive use of resources and an unsustainable economic model, but also against climate change. (source)
History
On December 23, 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. As revelers hung Christmas lights elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach.
These companies colluded, it turns out, to engineer incandescent lightbulbs with dramatically attenuated life spans: over the next years, bulbs that once burned some fifteen hundred to two thousand hours were made to last for only a thousand, thus enabling every company in the world to sell more bulbs and artificially inflate prices. The ruse supposedly ended in 1940 (though bulbs are still limited in spite of bulbs having burned for over a hundred years), and it was surprisingly sophisticated in its execution; the companies involved made “very strenuous efforts … to emerge from a period of long life lamps,” as one executive wrote. I love the language there—as if efficiency was merely a phase, an independent variable, something to be waited out.
This was the beginnig of planned obsolesence! The international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland is run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Phoebus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Combi-nation). Given this state of general repression, there seems no place for a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.
Nigel Whiteley picks up the story of how we became a nation that buys stuff and then throws it away at an astonishing pace:
Even before the Second World War, Whiteley writes, some businesses began to embrace what one influential 1932 book termed “creative waste”—the idea that throwing things away and buying new ones could fuel a strong economy. Its authors, Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens, identified the desire for ever-more-modern consumer goods as something unique to America, with its “enormous natural resources.”
“We still have tree-covered slopes to deforest and subterranean lakes of oil to tap with our gushers,” they wrote.
In the 1930s, Whiteley writes, many families were still saving for their first refrigerator or car. But, with the economic boom of the war years, Sheldon and Arens’ arguments quickly became more relevant. Average family incomes doubled in real terms between 1939 and 1945. Soon, middle-class families had all the televisions, cars, and home appliances they wanted. In the 1930s, consumerist pioneer Sears Roebuck began introducing a new refrigerator model each year. Though they were all essentially the same machine, “visual trappings of progress desired by consumers” kept sales up.
The problem for businesses now became continually “stimulating the urge to buy,” as J. Gordon Lippincott argued in the book Design for Business. “Any method that can motivate the flow of merchandise to new buyers will create jobs and work for industry, and hence national prosperity,” Lippincott wrote. “Our custom of trading in our automobiles every year, of having a new refrigerator, vacuum cleaner or electric iron every three or four years is economically sound.”
Whiteley notes that, for a rising middle class in the 1950s, possessions—particularly cars—became a way to advertise a family’s social position. The industry obligingly produced a range of designs in different price ranges, from Chevrolets to Cadillacs, and by noticeably changing the cars’ appearance every year or two.
In 1955, Harley J. Earl, who led General Motors’ head of design, announced that the average length of car ownership had dropped from five years in 1934 down to just two.
“When it is one year, we will have a perfect score,” he said.
As the ’50s came to an end, a critical response emerged to planned obsolescence. In three popular books, author Vance Packard depicted marketers psychologically manipulating consumers into buying inferior, unnecessary products.
But then, only a few years later, the first baby boomers reached adulthood. While some of them would emerge as critics of consumerism and the unsustainable use of natural resources, overall the first generation raised in post-war prosperity helped entrench planned obsolescence as an engine of the American economy.
What next?
Consumers International recently produced a set of recommendations for Securing Trust in the Internet of Things which included calls for:
- connected products to be easily upgradeable
- updates to be made available to consumers regardless of location
- devices, adaptors and other connection points to be made compatible with each other
- Clear, comparable and credible information to be provided concerning expected lifetime and reparability of products
- Products to be designed and built with resource efficiency in mind, from using sustainably produced materials and construction methods; to providing clear guidance to consumers on the most efficient use, re-use/repair and disposal of the product and its components.
The recommendations echoed those taken up by the G20 on the idea of fair use and clear ownership, which stated that ‘consumers need guarantees of their right to fair use. Controls that producers can exercise over the use of a product and its related data should be legitimate, fair and proportionate’. A commitment from the Argentinean presidency of the 2018 G20 to continue improving trust in the digital world gives consumer organisations and other groups the opportunity to further develop this work and identify practical solutions.
Consumers International member Test-Achats/TestAankoop has set up a reporting tool called Trop-vite-use on its website, aimed at creating a list of products which people feel have stopped working or worn out too quickly. Once enough information is collated, they will be able to target their product testing and advise on which brands to avoid. Although the reporting tool is not only for Internet of Things products, difficulties with fixing or keeping connected devices secure in the long term are key issues for durability in the Internet of Things.
There’s a role for legislation too. Through our UN programme on consumer information for sustainability, we’ve been working with UN Environment, the French government and others to provide policy recommendations. Together we have recommended a number of policy and industry actions to increase product lifespan and reduce environmental waste – a law against planned obsolescence; minimum durability criteria; product lifetime labelling; affordable and accessible repairs; Right to Repair legislation; monitoring of trends in product lifetimes; and consumer education and information.
Or is consumer demand something that could turn the tide on this issue? Take for example Fairphone, an ethically produced and easy to self-repair phone launched in 2013, which sold 25,000 handsets before production had even started. They now have 100,000 plus customers. Could smaller disrupter companies offer consumers ethically sourced and environmentally friendly alternatives?
Or do we need to look at new business models altogether? Maybe instead of owning products we should rent tech from companies, sending back our old tech for reuse when we’re ready for a replacement. That might be a good move for tech companies who have faced a barrage of criticism recently over various issues and are under increasing pressure to take more responsibility for the impact they have in our world.
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE PLAYLIST:
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