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?
Most is economics of scale and mass production; repair is device & damage specific, which does not scale at all. Add exploitation of workers, just in time deliveries eliminating storage costs, the fact that transporting parts for 100 devices takes much more transport volume than 100 devices themselves…
a standout product is the steam deck: every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap. I don’t know how valve did it, but that should be the standard the industry should be aiming at.
That’s part of the problem isn’t it tho? When products aren’t designed to be serviceable, let alone to be serviceable by someone not specialized, and spare parts aren’t easily available (not even at 3rd parties), your only option quickly becomes to just buy a new one.
A few years back I replaced the screen on my Xiaomi Mi5. Parts were okayish to order, and while I did succeed, I wouldn’t have called it doable by someone who’s not afraid to turn their phone into a glorified paperweight. And that’s only gotten worse since then.
Still, even for the Steam Deck as an example, which is probably the absolute closest we can get to the ideal case of the economy of repair, I’ve been hoping to buy every single individual part of the Steam Deck and assemble it into a complete Steam Deck myself for the fun and adventure of doing it myself (as someone who already had experiences repairing laptops), but everywhere I’ve looked it’s always more expensive to buy all individual parts of a Steam Deck, than buying one preassembled and officially sold. And this is not even counting the work hour it will take me to finish the process of building it.
But then again, there’s also the chicken and egg question involved in how exactly we got into a situation like this in our society these days.
Mass production and volume discounting. A circuit board can have hundreds of resistors on it. If yours has one resistor go bad you can buy a new one and replace it. But do you think it’s reasonable for you to get that one resistor for the same unit price as the company that orders a hundred million resistors a month?
For one thing, your one resistor takes about the same amount of labour and shipping costs as a tape reel of 10 thousand resistors (about the size of a dinner plate). So you’re already paying 10 thousand times the unit price on shipping and handling for that one resistor! For a manufacturer it’s not even worth their time to sell you 1 resistor. So you end up going through potentially multiple intermediaries before you can buy just 1. Each level of middlemen adds to the cost for you.
Yeah, there we get into the part where logistics for a lot of spare parts are simply more expensive than for a finished product. You need more storage space, you need more workers for that storage space, you need to keep track of a large amount of inventory, and you cant fully standardize packaging since different parts have different needs when shipped. If you want to make a buck out of that extra work too, we have the situation that the sum of the parts costs less than the parts themselves.