An Increasingly Disposable World

Use it today, then throw it away.

Welcome to today's world of consumer products.  Now, more than ever, thanks to Wal-Mart and the recession, consumers demand products they can buy at low prices.  Simple enough.  What most people don't understand is that a low priced product has a variety of non-monetary costs.  We (Americans) don't seem to care about that as long as it means we can keep a few extra dollars in our pockets.  We should care.

I hear laments daily about how China has become the manufacturing capital of the world and how jobs are vanishing in factories.  No secret there.  In China, young girls work grueling hours in factories making things like electric toothbrushes.  They get paid just a few cents an hour.  Because labor is so inexpensive, it is more profitable to make things in China and ship them here.  That means there's a reason you can buy an electric toothbush for 3 bucks....someone on the other end was exploited.  Additionally, materials and workmanship are often subpar because the focus is on quantity, not quality.  The result... Use it today, then throw it away.

It would be great if we could make things here, but nobody would work in a factory making $3 electric toothbrushes.  The workers union would make sure employees got paid $25 an hour and received full health benefits, pensions and a variety of other perks.  When all was said and done, that toothbrush would cost $12.  When placed side by side at the store, which one do you think would sell better?  We can make all the arguments we want for buying American.  When we get to the checkout counter and have to count out the dollars, things change.  This is simple economics.

The deeper problem is that we've made physical price the most important attribute when shopping.  We want more stuff for the amount of money we have so the compromise is to make items of inferior quality that can be sold for less.  Nothing is made very well anymore.  What used to be made from steel is now plastic and what was made of thick plastic is now made of thin plastic.  More and more, the products we buy are designed to last a shorter amount of time.  Lower price means shorter product life.  Planned Obsolescence.  Made to break so we'll buy another, then another.  The words "They don't make 'em like they used to." are very true.  Instead of one good $12 electric toothbrush, we'd rather buy six $3 toothbrushes over the course of a few years.  That's five extra broken devices in the trash.  A monumental waste.

It is amazing how many products end up in the trash.  To illustrate...Just today....I was working in the garden.  I decided to take the tarp off of the henhouse since the intense summer sun is no longer a threat to the well being of our chickens.  The tarp is about disintegrated...after one season because it was manufactured using the thinnest material possible.  Into the trash it goes.  We have two oscillating sprinklers in the garden.  Neither of them oscillates anymore.  They just flood one area of the garden.  We thought they looked pretty sturdy when we bought them last year, but I guess they weren't.  I'm tossing them in favor of a sprinkler with no moving parts.   The hose guides we placed in the ground to keep the hoses from crushing the plants are all broken.  They're made of plastic.  Our patio umbrella needs to be dumped as well.  It broke on a breezy day.  The ribs were thin and cheap and could hardly stand anything more than a light breeze.  One of our lawn chairs needs to go as well.  One of the welds in the frame broke.  None of these items are more than a year or two old.  They all need replacing...already.  Multiply this scene by the millions of households in our country and you know why the Home Depot is jammed every weekend.

For most products, there is a lack of high quality alternatives and so we are stuck buying and re-buying the same products.  This all but ensures a predictable cash flow for the manufacturers.  Great for the stockholders, bad for the average consumer and the rest of the world as our landfills accumulate all the stuff that was designed to break.  Engineers spend hours in back offices designing products with a very predictable life cycle.  A critical part is designed to last only so long under average use before it fails.  That length of time needs to be long enough for the customer to feel like he or she received "enough" service out of it to justify buying the same product again when it fails.  If it breaks too soon, there is a risk the buyer will choose a different product.

When I was a kid, the thought of any "durable" product lasting only one year was unconscionable.  We had the same lawn sprinklers until I was a teenager.  Stuff actually lasted for awhile.  Now we're used to constantly replacing things.  It can only get worse from here.

It might be nice if we could get past needing more junk that costs less and focused on buying only what we really need.  Then we'd have a few bucks to pay a fair price for something that might have a life cycle that isn't measured in weeks.  We'd also stop wasting our natural resources that are currently used for making junk that ends up in the landfill.  Time to get past "Low price trumps all."  We really do get what we pay for and indirectly, we even pay for what we don't get in the form of exploited resources and people.

How long should this product last?