Obsolete by Design
by author Gail Johnson

Look around your home, and chances are, you’re surrounded by a lot of stuff. How much of that stuff do you want to get rid of because it’s old, outdated, or all of a sudden uncool?

But come on: how much of that stuff do you really have to replace? Do you genuinely need a new computer screen, DVD player, cellphone, couch, or carpet, or have you become a pawn in a manufacturer’s game?

Planned obsolescence

The name of the game is planned obsolescence. The term describes the deliberate process by which manufacturers make products that become useless, out of date, or out of fashion within a specific (usually short) time frame. Consumers then toss the old model and buy a new one, boosting profits as well as landfills.

“The Industrial Revolution enabled us to produce too many things for us to consume,” explains Giles Slade, the Richmond, BC, author of the book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2006).

“So manufacturers and marketers had to find ways for us to consume them. That’s where branding, packaging, disposable items, and planned obsolescence come in. Basically, we’re nose deep in garbage, and we’re running out of resources to make things with.

“It’s not as if they can’t design things that last. Of course we have the technology to make things last,” Slade adds. “People need to recognize when they’re being manipulated by marketing. Otherwise we’re all contributing to the growth machine that’s consuming everything on our planet and making a dark future for our kids.”

Planned obsolescence itself is nothing new. American industrial designer Brooks Stevens coined the term in 1954, explaining it at an advertising conference as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”

Disposable culture

What has changed, however, is the sheer volume of items we’re buying and discarding soon after, electronic products in particular. The damage our disposable culture is doing to the planet is escalating at a perilous pace.

International environmental health and sustainability expert Annie Leonard, the force behind The Story of Stuff, a must-see online documentary, describes planned obsolescence as another word for “designed for the dump.” “It means they actually make stuff that is designed to be useless as quickly as possible so we will chuck it and go buy a new one,” Leonard explains in her film (storyofstuff.com). “It’s obvious with stuff such as plastic bags and coffee cups, but now it’s even big stuff: mops, DVDs, cameras, barbecues even, everything.

“Even computers,” she adds. “Have you noticed that when you buy a computer now, the technology is changing so fast that within a couple years, it’s actually an impediment to communication?

“I was curious about this so I opened up a big desktop computer to see what was inside. And I found out that the piece that changes each year is just a tiny little piece in the corner. But you can’t just change that one piece, because each new version is a different shape, so you gotta chuck the whole thing and buy a new one.”

Alexandra McPherson, North American project director of Clean Production Action, an international environmental nonprofit group, says that companies need to shift away from all things disposable and instead develop solutions for sustainability, including the use of green chemicals.

“The reason we have such a waste crisis – and it is a crisis –  is that most … products are not designed to last, and they’re not designed to be reused and recycled,” McPherson says.

Techno trash

Obsolete electronic products are the fastest growing source of waste and one of the most menacing threats to the environment, according to Ted Smith, chair of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, an American umbrella organization of nonprofit groups promoting responsible and sustainable production. He points to computer chips as a prime example of planned obsolescence.

“A new generation of computer chips comes along every 18 months,” Smith says. “What this is really doing is turning us into voracious consumers. What we have is a totally unsustainable model.

Gail Johnson is a Vancouver writer.

Source: alive #323, September 2009