Re: Why not turn back the clock?

Joe wrote:
Farmer Giles wrote:
Ivan wrote:

I know someone's going to tell me how much more green and efficient modern machines are, but from an environmental point of view the production of new stuff from the raw materials through the complete manufacturing chain and into my kitchen would probably use far more energy and cause more pollution than the continued use of my present 'less efficient' equipment for decades to come!


Absolutely correct. Thankfully spares for 'white goods' are still relatively easy to find - not so with a lot of other equipment. Even so, the price of some spare parts is often seriously out of kilter with the price of new equipment - this has to change. Forty years ago we repaired almost everything, now very little. Things are thrown away with minor faults because repair is said to be 'uneconomical'.

It's not just the price of spare parts though, or their availability, but the way that things are put together - often to make repair virtually impossible. In the past the opposite occurred,and things were put together with servicing and repair very much a part of the overall design.

Simple economics. It costs extra to add any repair/faultfinding facilities to something.

A 'rising standard of living' implies that the cost of labour rises faster than the cost of goods. Higher technology means that more expensive labour is needed for repair, and that cost continues to rise faster than the cost of goods. The range of goods that are economic to repair shrinks continuously.

A decent (metal, non-electric) kettle would once have cost a couple of days' wages for most people, and repairing it was not only technologically possible but made a lot of sense. A discarded kettle with a small hole would quickly have been salvaged and repaired. Today, a kettle of indifferent quality costs half an hour's pay and is unrepairable. And there's no way it could be made repairable without making it from metal, with a standardised element that is guaranteed to be manufactured for a decade or so. Who would pay for one like that? Or be willing to go back to heating a non-electric metal one on the cooker?

The price of parts? It's mostly clerical and logistical. You want to buy a ten penny spare part, made in Korea? The amount of work needed to pass that along the supply chain is almost exactly the same as for a five-hundred-pound finished product. The five-hundred-pound item costs a third of that at the factory gate in the Far East, another third is gross profit and the last third is the total cost of getting it from there to you, passing through two or three intermediate companies, all with managers and lawyers and accountants to pay in addition to the useful staff. Transport costs are lower for parts that are much smaller than the product, but clerical costs are not, and the economic price of that ten-penny spare is still likely to be fifty pounds or more. So they won't sell you one, they'll only sell ten thousand to a distributor, at five hundred pounds, and then you rely on local demand for nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine others in order for your one to be available at all. Mostly, parts just 'aren't available in this country' because the demand for a particular part is too small for the price to be low enough for people to be willing to pay.

Things will change, of course, as raw materials get more expensive, as China meets the developed world in salaries and goods prices, as oil for making plastic runs out, and so on, but that could all be decades away.

We all understand the economics that are at work here - even though they make no real sense. But, sooner or later, we are going to have address the overall problem created by this wasteful throw-away society - and 'simple economics', and the irresponsible laissez-faire policies of short sighted politicians, will have to make way for a more holistic and long-term sustainable approach.

It's not just a matter of a plentiful supply of raw materials either, there are many other factors that will come to the fore before that becomes the major issue.

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