Here’s an interesting take on what I think is a fundamentally depressing truth:
https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/the-lifespan-of-large-appliances-is-shrinking-e5fb205b
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Yeah, but why is it depressing? Initially, I feel bad too, but then I thought… this is what most customers want (even if they don’t say it). Many customers like to buy and switch up applicances frequently.
Many customers want to always pay substantially more and pay it ever more often?
I guess I’m too old to understand why someone with a 3-y-o expensive household appliance that works just fine would want to replace it with something more expensive, harder to repair, and with an even shorter lifespan.
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The last time I did a replace-before-necessary, the fridge was 14+ years old. I figured I’d get a head start, since the shelves were cracked and the lights didn’t work. The replacement didn’t last 3 years. I hold my breath on the replacement’s replacement. Yes, it’s the components and the circuit boards that cause the most probs. And no, I don’t want to connect my appliances to the Internet, so thanks for nothing.
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Hmmmm. I wonder where the jettisoned appliances go. OTOH, what would the economic impact be if people insisted on lasting appliances and hung onto them. Manufacturers, shippers, vendors, installers.
They go into the recycle/refuse stream. Some actual recycling may happen, but almost none of that is direct re-use. There’s also a minuscule used market.
Where I live, there’s a $25 “recycle fee”, supposedly intended to defray the costs of separating out the components that are the worst polluters. Then they get crushed and get a train ride to a landfill.
What would the economy do? Readjust. We’ve seen such a readjustment in…lightbulbs. Incandescent bulbs originally lasted for decades. Then they were redesigned to fail much faster, so we’d have to buy replacements often. But then LED bulbs came about, and were refined to appeal more. LED bulbs now typically claim 50,000 hours’ longevity.
What of the disastrous economic effect of everyone’s light bulbs not having to be replaced regularly?
Readjustment often has its good aspects as well as some pain.
Totally. I just don’t see the value of buying new appliances solely for newness’ sake.
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You wouldn’t happen to be able to provide a gift link, would you?
I don’t see much need to buy anything new just for newness sake. Even cell phones and computers have very long lives here.
From The Atlantic Daily:
How a device dies is almost as important as how it operates. Appliances that cannot be repaired the way the KitchenAid can become trash in just a few years. In the United States alone, we threw out 2.2 million tons’ worth of hair dryers, coffee pots, toasters, and other small appliances in 2018—the most recently available data from the Environmental Protection Agency—and 75 percent of that waste went into landfills. This is more than quadruple the amount from 1990, when the EPA first started collecting these data; we have become culturally comfortable with disposable gadgets filling an always-growing pile of polluting trash. Mr. Coffee does not biodegrade.
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Thanks. And that 1.7 million tons in the landfills is just the small appliances!
There should be grants or tax incentives for fixing what you have. And disposal fees that help train and fund repair techs. And an appliance certification of X-year repairability.
Kaleo for Emperor!
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Yep. 5.3 million tons of major appliances!
