Products Made to Break?
An Insight into Intentional Obsolescence
A. T. B. Gilchrist
IN 1879 THOMAS EDISON INVENTED THE LIGHTBULB, and today, for over 115 years, the Livermore Centennial Light Bulb at Fire Station #6, Livermore, California, USA, has been burning since it was installed in 1901. It took just 22 years for the technology at the time to be advanced enough to create a seemingly everlasting light bulb. And yet nowadays, it is a regular thing to replace our light bulbs every so often. So how is it, we go from lightbulbs lasting over 115 years, to lightbulbs that need to be replaced continuously? Allow me to introduce you to the Phoebus Cartel, born in the 1920’s and comprised of representatives from top light bulb manufacturers worldwide, such as Germany’s Osram, the United Kingdom’s Associated Electrical Industries, and General Electric (GE) in the United States (via a British subsidiary), who colluded to artificially reduce bulbs’ lifetimes from potentially decades, (evident in the Livermore Centennial Light Bulb), to 1,000 hours. The reason: profit.
Initially, companies had installed and maintained whole electrical systems to support bulb-based lighting in the dwellings of the new technology’s rich, early adopters. Seeing as consumers were not on the hook to pay for replacement units, lighting companies therefore sought to produce light bulbs which lasted as long as possible. The business model changed, however, as the light bulb customer base grew more mass-market. Greater sums of money could be reaped, companies figured, by making bulbs disposable and putting replacement costs onto customers.
This practice has not been relegated to the fascinating markets of luminescence. In fact, as the practice crops up in all sorts of other industries. Nowadays electronics, such as smartphones, often get discarded after a mere couple years of use. Parts might be deliberately produced in fragile or flimsy ways, which means that after a honeymoon period – covered under a warranty – the entire product no longer functions. The paradox, however, is that especially for high brand value products, the product must initially work excellently. The premature aging process through calculating and planning when various circuit-breakers in the product shall fail, reliably renders the product useless or less useful after a certain predetermined date, even if often only one aspect or component of the product truly breaks .
Engineering a product’s premature aging already happens in the design phase and is therefore a direct form of planned obsolescence. This strategy was applied, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s for portable radios, for which a premature lifespan of three years was set. Such sales practices have carried on with home printers which had an immobilizing chip that, once the specified number of pages was printed, made the printer unusable no matter the condition or state of the actual hardware. This was explained by companies as the “components have reached the end of their usable life.”
Unfortunately a large portion of waste is because of such corporate efforts, leading to the generation of around 40 million tons of electronic waste every year, worldwide, the equivalent to throwing out 800 laptops every second. This is one of the reasons E-waste comprises 70% of our overall toxic waste.
However as environmental consciousness of the terrible amounts of waste generated by a throwaway culture has risen, consumer goods may become less disposable. Google’s Project Ara, for instance, is developing a smartphone-like device with six slots for swapping out technologically outdated components, versus traditionally binning the entirety of an aging smartphone. Furthermore, Tesla has plans to take back the spent batteries in its clients’ cars and repurpose them for home energy storage. The company also auto-downloads and upgrades the software in its clients’ cars as the vehicles charge overnight. This solution of upgrading software rather than hardware may turn out to be one that allows future products to live longer.