Why is it often cheaper to buy new than repair old and how can repairing be encouraged on different levels of society?
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I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that's a step to the right direction. Still I'm left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it's often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
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I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that's a step to the right direction. Still I'm left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it's often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
It only became cheaper to buy new over repairing the old because companies stopped producing replacement parts, and making things repairable.
If they never enshittified things to be unrepariable, repairing things would still be cheaper than buying a new one.
Encouraging people to repair things isn't going to help much when a fuckton of things simply are not made in a way that they can even be repaired at home or even by the people who made the thing.
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It only became cheaper to buy new over repairing the old because companies stopped producing replacement parts, and making things repairable.
If they never enshittified things to be unrepariable, repairing things would still be cheaper than buying a new one.
Encouraging people to repair things isn't going to help much when a fuckton of things simply are not made in a way that they can even be repaired at home or even by the people who made the thing.
It's more about industrialisation making new products really cheap. Think about a pair of trousers. They're exactly as repairable as trousers ever were, and you can still get your trousers repaired economically. But the cost of a minor repair will total about half the price of a cheap pair of trousers. So there is little point repairing trousers unless they're expensive - you may as well buy a new pair if they're cheap.
This isn't because of planned obsolescence, this is because clothing used to be far, far more expensive - you can come up with various multipliers but somewhere between 10x and 100x as expensive in terms of how many days of work was needed to pay for them. This is because industrialisation means that cloth and clothes can be made with a fraction of the labour as it did centuries ago.
Sewing machines have also made repairs much more efficient, but to a far lesser degree - someone doing clothing repairs has overheads beyond the limited bit of work that is sewing up a split seam or rip, which are almost non-existent for the business producing clothes in the first place.
So, if this is the case for simple items like clothes where repair itself is more economical nowadays, how much more true is it for complex items where each repair job is completely custom?
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It's more about industrialisation making new products really cheap. Think about a pair of trousers. They're exactly as repairable as trousers ever were, and you can still get your trousers repaired economically. But the cost of a minor repair will total about half the price of a cheap pair of trousers. So there is little point repairing trousers unless they're expensive - you may as well buy a new pair if they're cheap.
This isn't because of planned obsolescence, this is because clothing used to be far, far more expensive - you can come up with various multipliers but somewhere between 10x and 100x as expensive in terms of how many days of work was needed to pay for them. This is because industrialisation means that cloth and clothes can be made with a fraction of the labour as it did centuries ago.
Sewing machines have also made repairs much more efficient, but to a far lesser degree - someone doing clothing repairs has overheads beyond the limited bit of work that is sewing up a split seam or rip, which are almost non-existent for the business producing clothes in the first place.
So, if this is the case for simple items like clothes where repair itself is more economical nowadays, how much more true is it for complex items where each repair job is completely custom?
I have to wonder how much a needle and thread is where you are that buying a new pair of pants is cheaper than patching a hole/tear in the ones you already have. Clothing is one of the few things that doesn't have this problem... But it also has an oversaturation problem so I could see pants being basically free in some parts of the world.
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I have to wonder how much a needle and thread is where you are that buying a new pair of pants is cheaper than patching a hole/tear in the ones you already have. Clothing is one of the few things that doesn't have this problem... But it also has an oversaturation problem so I could see pants being basically free in some parts of the world.
I'm talking about how much it costs to get this service, rather doing it yourself. It will take longer to do it yourself as someone who isn't doing it every day (and you don't have a sewing machine in this scenario, right?)
