Sweden to Incentivize Product Repairs in Effort to Reduce Consumer Waste — Sept. 30, 2016

 

Our world is being totally trashed, not out of necessity, out of convenience. Something has changed in recent decades, and companies deliberately no longer produce goods that will last as long as possible, instead capitalizing on the consumer’s willingness to toss something in the trash and replace it with something new, rather than go through the effort of having it fixed.

It’s called planned obsolescence, a strategy of some product manufacturers. The basic idea is to engineer a product to have a predictably short lifetime so that when it malfunctions or breaks, the company can profit by selling another product. The additional sales and profits make it possible to sell more products at a lower cost, thereby increasing the attractiveness in a replacement. This is especially true for technology products, and some companies are finally beginning to design products that can evolve as technology does.

This business model has led to the collapse of the repair industry which used to be a thriving source of skilled labor for many people while saving resources and reducing mountains of waste.

Sweden is now poised to become the first country in the world to directly address this issue, and has recently proposed tax incentives for repairing and re-using many consumer goods…….

Read more: http://www.wakingtimes.com/2016/09/30/sweden-incentivize-product-repairs-reduce-consumer-waste/