Where I live we have big disposal fees for tires, dishwashers, etc. Isn't that just the free market form of an incentive? Does Sweden not have garbage disposal fees?
Where I live, there is a disposal fee for tires as well. It's about 2$ per tire, though ;) With tires, however, it's not like you buy a new one because you got bored with your old tire. You change them to maintain road safety.
Recently I managed to repair an old iPod Video - it's about 25$ if you want to buy used, working one. I managed to order the parts from AliExpress for about 10$ total. I make enough money to buy myself a new music player if I wanted to, but the fact that there will be one less potentially toxic piece of garbage somewhere in a landfill feels really good.
Wow, I just went down the iFixit rabbit hole of seeing what that entails. My hat is off to you on repairing yours.
Had I been you, I feel like I would have spent the $10 on parts, destroyed the iPod while trying to repair it, then still bought the replacement item--probably something new for $100+ that gets good marks for hackability, and then failed to make full use of it.
Thank you. I don't think I would be able to touch anything newer than that, honestly. Especially with current-generation devices, where everything is literally glued together, to a point where disassembling it and assembling back is next to impossible unless you have the specific tools (and skills) already.
I have iPhone 5S and the battery is kind of giving up. Still going to try to find a shop (too bad it won't be Apple official one) where they'd do a battery replacement before buying a new one.
We do but for the kind of garbage like tires and dishwashers the importing/producing/selling party is required to also take care of the costs related to the product after its life-cycle.
Effectively this trickles down to the consumer of course so you've already paid for the disposal indirectly.
No, there is no garbage disposal fees for private individuals (companies have to pay) when disposing those kind of things. I think the reasoning is that people would throw away environmentally damaging stuff in the normal trash or dump it in nature if there was a cost attached to leaving it at the "environment station" where they can properly take care of it.
Perhaps they could start by talking to Ikea and H&M as part of this initiative?
These are two of their largest exports, both of which have flooded the global retail market with cheap and disposable goods.
The fact that both of these companies produce more "stylish" designs of throwaway goods does not diminish their impact on the environment or lessen their very sizable contribution to and promotion of disposable culture.
Perhaps Sweden has many such "waste to energy" facilities but they aren't as common as land fills and garbage dumps in most of the international markets that Ikea operates in.
At any rate wouldn't it still be better to not produce the waste in the first place?
Also how much how much energy is consumed turning that waste into energy?
What is hypothetically possible - i.e something can be used to green-wash a crappy brand in marketing materials and what is actually done in practical terms are two very different things.
Practically none of Ikea or H&M stuff is manufactured in Sweden and exported, though. Sweden is the hub for brand management and such, but the manufacturing is distributed to where the contractors do it cheapest: China, Russia, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam.
So the disposable goods are not exported from Sweden, they're imported to Sweden and other Western nations. And typically a part of the brand management is quality control that makes this cheap stuff slightly better, quality-wise, than the generic imports from same countries.
Both Ikea and H&M are Swedish companies that have exported a brand that is synonymous with disposable culture, which is the point in the original article.
Why does it matter that they source their cheap labor and manufacturing from elsewhere? Furthermore Ikea and H&M are not quality goods.
What is this distinction between a brand and where the goods are shipped from? The profit from those sales are booked to a Swedish company.
From a very recent article - July 4th of this year:
'IKEA Group Chief Executive Peter Agnefjall said the push was due to customers increasingly demanding more durable products.
"Customers expect us to do more (on quality). And nowadays you can't really make products that are throwaway: when you buy a sofa table it needs to be built to last," he told Reuters.'
I mean there you have a C-level Ikea officer admitting there's an issue. What more do you need?
There are similar systems in Sweden for renovation and house cleaning, so this can be implemented very straightforwardly. The invoice will contain the deduction and the repairer will report it to the tax authority. Works really well.
I like the idea in principle, but the cost of repairing something is so huge - due to direct labour costs and related social expenditures - that it is very difficult to change this balance with just VAT rate adjustments.
Fixing a five-year-old TV might cost 200$ (but you don't know, there's no guarantee). A new TV costs 300$. Now, if you reduce the VAT for fixing work from 25% to 12 %, the repair cost goes down to 180$.
Is that big enough difference to change the way people act? Mostly not. We still realise that the fixed TV might break at another point next week, and there is no warranty. If I just throw away the old thing and buy a new TV, it'll have 6 or 12 month warranty and 2 year defect liability. So it's still a better buy to get a new one.
Plus the new TV probably has more features than the old one.
you just came up with arbitrary cost to arbitrary appliance with arbitrary lengths of time. Unless these figures are based on some statistical relevance this whole argument is moot.
It's less arbitrary than you might think. I've been half-heartedly shopping for a new TV in the past couple of days and it's amazing what you can get now. Here's a 49-inch 4K LED TV for $350: https://www.amazon.com/Sceptre-U508CV-UMK-49-Inch-Ultra-Mode...
Sure, it may not be exactly what people here would want, but it's not necessarily a bad TV, if we hypothesize someone who is choosing between repairing something 5 years old or buying a new one. With what the TV industry has done lately, it's almost certainly better than what they're replacing.
And at the very least, you're risking $200 for a repair. Labor may not cost that much out of the gate, but repair parts can get expensive fast simply because stocking obsolete panels for several years before someone finally buys one has a certain cost associated with it. Factor in the risk of expensive parts, factor in the risk that the repair won't actually work for one reason or another (misdiagnosis, the repair fixes one worn part but there's a dozen others ready to break), and it doesn't take much before replacing the TV is the better choice for the consumer.
That said, TVs are also the worst-case scenario, because TV prices have plunged lately in a way that even the computer industry would be a bit jealous of. It makes the case for repair pathologically poor. Many other things have much better cases to be made; appliances haven't plunged in price, and have large landfill footprints. Bicycles can last a long time if you care for them, and bicycle shops have the ability to repair most things quickly enough that they don't have to charge "by the hour" but can just charge flat fees for various tasks. etc.
And funnily, most people do repair large appliances, bicycles, and even computers. Even clothes, when expensive and high enough quality, get repaired instead of replaced.
It's almost like people already have a decent grasp on when it does and when it doesn't make sense to fix something.
Nobody demolishes a house and builds a new one when a window breaks. And nobody throws away a car with a flat tyre or a bicycle with a broken chain.
I think you'd be surprised by just how many bicycles with flat tires and/or broken (actually, usually rusted solid) chains end up abandoned in the backs of garages, never to be ridden again.
I volunteered for a couple years at the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op[0], and helped fix for sale countless bikes that needed 15-30 minutes of work to correct whatever the original problem was.
You're right that a bicycle with busted chain remains viable transportation given a little elbow grease. That said, people who bought a $150 bike probably aren't that invested in cycling anyway, and so when it breaks, even with a trivial repair, it's effectively done for.
I know I'm invoking stereotypes about people who aren't invested in something and get into it in the cheapest way possible, but easily-fixable cheap bikes are the bread and butter at OCBC.
You're right, plenty bikes get abandoned out of pure laziness. But I think most people realize they can be fixed, which is why they're abandoned in the back of their garage rather than thrown in the trash and replaced.
Right?
For example, my mum has a bike like that. She's been putting off repairs for some 15 years now. Mostly it just needs some love from someone to adjust gears and stuff to work again. She knows it's still a working bike so she doesn't toss or replace. But it's easier to just avoid using a bike than to invest the energy to fix that one. We've tried a couple of times but it's juuuust bad enough to need a professional, which increases logistics exponentially.
My point is, abandoned and unused is very different from thrown away and replaced.
I admit the numbers are arbitrary, but I do claim they are realistic. Based on personal experience and some insight into the pricing of electronics and cost of labour (in a Sweden-like environment).
If you change the purchasing power parity figures a lot, then it will be different. Fixing a TV may make more sense in Russia, for instance, than Sweden, not to mention some third-world countries.
I disagree that the whole argument is moot but the yes those are made up numbers. The gist of the argument sounds about right to me. I had a vacuum cleaner break and I took it to a local fix-it man and he wanted $80 dollars to fix in parts, labor and tax and wanted it for the week. The vacuum is $130 dollars (MSRP) on amazon right now and $70 on sale. My used vacuum probably is only worth $30 working. I'm pretty sure that this is because there are not many stores of that type and he probably doesn't get much traffic so charges appropriately. I could shop around and find someone better but there are few options and that quote was already a waste of my time at this point.
I think that over time these costs could come down if there was demand as there would be competition and probably sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile. I would like to see more devotion to maintenance and repair but currently the numbers seem unfavorable at least for small appliances.
So to provide some real numbers I just did this with a dishwasher. The circulation pump broke on a 4 year old dishwasher and would cost around $180 to repair but a new one with a 5 year guarantee would cost $350. Given the repairs came with no such guarantee and the price different was not too crazy we just got the new one.
FYI: Prices converted from South African Rand.
> Plus the new TV probably has more features than the old one.
That right there would kill the repair incentive for me. I keep my stuff for a long time, so a failure is partly welcome. Your new $300 TV in today's dollars is probably cheaper than my old and feature-poor TV. I'm almost like a small distance time traveler every time I buy something more complicated than a pair of socks.
This is me as well. I keep stuff for as long as possible because of a mixture of tight-fistedness and anxiety about my environmental impact. So when something breaks there's always part of me that's delighted to be finally "allowed" to buy the latest product.
Electronics improve so quickly that it may not make sense to repair an old TV. But other goods like washer/dryers, dishwashers, etc make sense to repair.
My 7 year old washing machine broke down twice in the past 2 years - one repair would have cost $150, the other would have been $300 - $400, but the part needed wasn't available any more so it wasn't repairable. Nearly all of those costs were labor. All for a $700 washing machine. I'm fortunate that I was able to fix it myself (I found a salvaged "impossible to buy" control board on eBay). For the other repair, a contact broke off of a temperature sensor, I suspect the repairman would have just replaced the $40 sensor, I soldered a new contact to it and saved the sensor.
There's not a whole lot of difference in features (at least not features that I want) for new washing machines -- I don't need (or want) one that's internet connected, I don't need a an expensive touch screen.
I don't even use 90% of the features on my current machine, I don't need a dozen cycles and a time delay down to the second, I just want a few basic cycles and a machine that's easy to repair.
Yes the labor cost of manufacture is a) almost entirely automated and b) applied to a million count so the cost of that automation is subject to economies of scale. The human component of diagnosis and repair is not scalable, and isn't distributed. About the best way to approximate it is a $30 per year surcharge on all such products to pay for an extended warranty; that everyone would have to pay.
There will always be something newer and better but it's not sustainable for everyone to keep going out and buying it. I've only bought one TV in my entire life.
Sweden's move is definitely a step in the right direction but I really wish something like that would even have a chance of passing in the US.
Repair work creates jobs for regular people. This is a good thing. People buying less new TVs just means less corporate profits. This doesn't affect the little guy anyway.
This kind of law kills 2 birds with 1 stone. Pollution and income inequality. I really wish more people would think this way.
Providing an incentive to repair through the tax system may have a limited but positive effect. A better choice would be to mandate long lifetime design and manufacture with penalties to the manufacturer for early failures.
I was browsing Kijiji the other day and was shocked to see how many people sell their perfectly working appliances just because they are tired of how they look (white) and prefer the newer trend of "stainless steel"...
But ... selling them means somebody else will use them. Its not the same as throwing them away. Its called 'reuse' which is actually much better than 'recycle'
Sure, they're not throwing them away. They sell their appliances to buy new models, but new appliances obviously take resources and energy to build and transport. Same for cars, TVs, gadgets, etc.
And presumably someone is buying the old appliance and uses it, instead of buying a new one: one appliance more bought new on one side, one less on the other.
There is of course the factor that through this people can afford appliances that otherwise wouldn't have them, but that at least has a clear benefit for them.
Repair labor is a huge percent of the repair cost, and includes no warranty, and hence the incentive to just buy new. If the government is going to intervene, maybe what they ought to do is a.) reduce the VAT on repairs, b.) require a 90-180 day whole device warranty, c.) increase the VAT on new products. a) and b) would approximately cancel each other cost wise to the consumer, but give them more confidence in the repair process, which a) alone doesn't do; and c) increases the spread in cost between repair vs new which was the point of a).
Of course the ideal would be to make it just as easy to disassemble consumer devices as it is to assemble them. i.e. if the cost of disassembly were equal to or less the value of physical materials in the product.
This is anecdotal for sure, but I've noticed in travels that poorer countries tend to value repairs and older appliances more. Presumably, this is because labor is cheaper.
Perhaps a more streamlined way to sell (or even donate) old stuff to poorer countries could combat the wastefulness in a productive way.
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