Stop buying new stuff, says government advisor

moneyinmypocket

My parents used to rent a tv and VHS recorder. I remember the tv man coming out to service them/repair them. Nowadays as others have said people just buy new items and relegate/chuck away old ones.

kabayiri

I have upgraded/replaced so many parts on some of my hifi components, it's almost like 'Triggers new broom'! Most people think this behaviour is madness. They'd rather buy the latest microhifi where when one bit fails you might as well chuck it away.

Mend & Make Do? I'm living it man

Loughton_Monkey

Graham_Devon wrote: »

...Theres a huge fallacy when it comes to taxing the older cars off the road based on emissions, only to encourage you to go and buy a new one that, just the manufacturing and shipping of, will cost the same emissions as driving round your old one for another 3 years.

That's a relief! I will be saving emissions. The extra emissions in building it will pollute Germany, not UK. We can sell them a few Carbon Credits!

Graham_Devon wrote: »

...Stick it on ebay. Someone time warped from the good old days will buy it and and pop in a £30 reman unit. Put the sale price towards a chair.

Brilliant joke about the chair.

Not being hard up for 30 quid, I'll still take it down the tip. You can have it for nothing if you wish!

gazter

woodbine wrote: »

i have no idea if this story is/was true but i remember being told 40 years ago that the reason they stopped making morris minors was because of the design they didnt rust easily and the engine was to easy to work on
compare that to todays cars with their computer systems etc

It almost certainly isnt. There is a generation of drivers who have never turned a key in a car, and it not start first time.

Quasar

Obsolescence is now built into most gadgets and appliances in order to create more custom for manufacturers. That, and not a year passes without a new operating system version, a new TV that does this and that and smartphones that do more and more except make coffee, and the sales patter is that really cool people do update their tech as and when it comes out.

We have bought everything and INTO everything. That is how corporations keep making bloated profits, pay little tax, and salt vast capitals away and out of the economy. The greed of the few has engineered a consumer market that is getting bigger and bigger and more wasteful. When we wake up from the have-it-all and have-it-now dream, we'll find resources are all but despoiled and there is very little left with which to make anything.

zagubov

I once taught on a science and technology course where I encountered the concept of Total Energy Costing. This estimated that half the energy costs of buying a car and running it for 10 years was getting the metal out of the ground and into the form of the car.

Runnig a car for as long as possible makes good sense if it saves on the expensive assembly costs.

So the govenrment's scrappage scheme seems like madness to me.

We've been led to believe our economy's fine if we're dragging the resources out of the ground and then buried back in landfill sites in record time. A stupid Red Queen's Race!

I'm horrified how we're hooked as consumption junkies when we just can't sustain this.

Loughton_Monkey

Quasar wrote: »

Obsolescence is now built into most gadgets and appliances in order to create more custom for manufacturers. That, and not a year passes without a new operating system version, a new TV that does this and that and smartphones that do more and more except make coffee, and the sales patter is that really cool people do update their tech as and when it comes out.

We have bought everything and INTO everything. That is how corporations keep making bloated profits, pay little tax, and salt vast capitals away and out of the economy. The greed of the few has engineered a consumer market that is getting bigger and bigger and more wasteful. When we wake up from the have-it-all and have-it-now dream, we'll find resources are all but despoiled and there is very little left with which to make anything.

Interesting view. I happen to think that generally speaking, most things are far more reliable now. Cars are a prime example. When you bought any car in 1970, you knew it would not last the decade due to rust alone, let alone 99 replacement parts that were necessary so often. Same with televisions. Always a valve blowing here, or the screen 'wearing out'....

But where you are perfectly right is that obsolescence comes not from durability, but by us all wanting the shiny new technology and gizmos. I see nothing wrong in principle, but a 'rich' country has to spend its money on something.

I worry less about resources than most. If we cut down all our oak trees, then when an oak table starts to cost £25,000 I think different materials will be found. So what if we run out of oil? We are not going to wake up one day to find oil companies telling us that that they're just about to pull out the last ever million barrels. Long, long, long before that, price will go to $200, then $1,000, then $3,000 in real money and so on over a period of 100 years or so. Lo and behold, other alternatives then become cheaper automatically.

For fossil fuels, this process has started already, and cheaper alternatives will doubtless be found after a decent period of research. Necessity is the mother of invention. I dislike all this panic of artificially increasing energy costs in an attempt to accelerate this, causing faulty, inefficient, and half-assed solutions to be used at huge expense when there is no guarantee that these alternatives can ever be efficient enough. They should be tested and evolved to death before being rolled out in bulk like wind farms.

Primates/humans have survived on this planet for the last 85 million years, and have generally improved economically almost 'straight line' without destroying the planet yet. Funnily enough, about 99.9999% of the time there was not a single drop of oil to be had!

zagubov

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

Interesting view. I happen to think that generally speaking, most things are far more reliable now. Cars are a prime example. When you bought any car in 1970, you knew it would not last the decade due to rust alone, let alone 99 replacement parts that were necessary so often. Same with televisions. Always a valve blowing here, or the screen 'wearing out'....

But where you are perfectly right is that obsolescence comes not from durability, but by us all wanting the shiny new technology and gizmos. I see nothing wrong in principle, but a 'rich' country has to spend its money on something.

I worry less about resources than most. If we cut down all our oak trees, then when an oak table starts to cost £25,000 I think different materials will be found. So what if we run out of oil? We are not going to wake up one day to find oil companies telling us that that they're just about to pull out the last ever million barrels. Long, long, long before that, price will go to $200, then $1,000, then $3,000 in real money and so on over a period of 100 years or so. Lo and behold, other alternatives then become cheaper automatically.

For fossil fuels, this process has started already, and cheaper alternatives will doubtless be found after a decent period of research. Necessity is the mother of invention. I dislike all this panic of artificially increasing energy costs in an attempt to accelerate this, causing faulty, inefficient, and half-assed solutions to be used at huge expense when there is no guarantee that these alternatives can ever be efficient enough. They should be tested and evolved to death before being rolled out in bulk like wind farms.

Primates/humans have survived on this planet for the last 85 million years, and have generally improved economically almost 'straight line' without destroying the planet yet. Funnily enough, about 99.9999% of the time there was not a single drop of oil to be had!

Not convinced. We've had cars for over 100 years now, planes for a bit less.

Air technology has advanced phenomenally as its a form of public transport motivated by costs and practical issues.

Private car ownership has become a matter of fashion and progress has been diverted into a dead-end where advance in efficency has been stymied by a self-defeating demand for chelsea tractor style SUVs and a ind of highway arms race where to drive an efficient car puts you at risk in any collision with any of the high-speed gas-guzzlers that are marketed at the public.

Are there any figures available for how many miles are covered each year by passengers in planes or in cars? Honestly like to know.

purch

grizzly1911 wrote: »

The first colour TV my parents had was always packing up. It had state of the art touch buttons, basically you joined the circuit when you touched the two metallic sides.The repair shop was next to useless.

The first colour TV we had was a Hitachi bought in 1975. It never ever broke down,and it's in my garage now and probably still works to this day (I even watched TV on it a couple of years ago before the analogue signal was switched off)

michaels

Everyone's favourite apple make their mega profits because they make their phones with built in batteries and no memory card slot so guaranteed built in obsolescence. Android manufacturers are now rushing to copy this design brilliance