I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that’s a step to the right direction. Still I’m left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it’s often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
I repair industrial machinery where it is worth it.
Phonecall and description of the problem: 15 minutes.
Guessing what parts may be broken and seeing if we have them in stock. Loading them into the car with my tools: 30 minutes.
Driving there, costs about 3€ per 10km where I live. Plus my time.
Disassembling and diagnose: minimum 15 minutes.
Replacing the part: best case 15 minutes.
Reassembly and test: best case 15 minutes.
Clean up the mess I made and get all my stuff can in the car: 15 minutes.
Drive back.
Fill in the time card, list replacement parts on invoice and send it: 15 minutes.
You’re looking at two hours plus driving for a job where everything goes right, and then spare parts on top of that.
If you’re doing it yourself you have to add an hour of watching YouTube on how to do it. Ordering the spare part, paying shipping which probably costs as much as the part itself. The job itself probably takes twice as long because it’s the first time you do it. You had to buy a special tool too because you did not have a torque wrench for T20. You maybe ordered the wrong part and have to get another.
At the end of the process you have a thing with all parts but one worn from a few years of use. Who knows what is next to break.
Or you could buy a new one for $500 and not have to worry for a year or two while it’s under warranty.
Where I work any problems with a company laptop or phone it just gets replaced and the original is disposed of. Cheaper that way when you factor in the cost of having components on hand, space to store them, the time to replace them and the premium you’d have to pay for either employing staff with those skills or giving them that level of training.
I can’t speak for everything, but I can speak for e-waste. Especially printers. Those things are made cheap as hell, but constructed so you can’t just get off the shelf parts. Being able to take the machine apart, find a replacement for whatever party is broken, install, and reassemble, you might have just bought a new printer for the same cost as the part. It’s almost the same with laptops, phones/tablets, televisions, etc. Brand doesn’t matter, it’s all the same. Right to repair doesn’t mean shit if you can’t even make the repairs.
I’d guess the repair option would look better if you had the same economic status as the person who initially put it together.
It’s in large part a problem of scale. Manufacturers buy parts in quantities so large that their per part cost is relatively tiny. Doubly so for Chinese manufacturers, because of currency conversion. If you as an individual want to buy one or two parts for a repair, it’s not profitable for companies to sell you those small quantities unless they charge what is sometimes exponentially more.
Buy a TV and crack the LCD, the new LCD will cost 90% of the price, and then you need to throw in labor. Let’s say $100. That’ll cover an hour of their time and the shops time because they first have to verify the model, talk to a vendor, get it shipped, then install it and deal with the drop off holding contacting you for pick up and payment processing. After paying the workers, maybe they made $50 off that repair if they are always busy. If a part is DOA, more costs. Total it all up and realize you spent $550 to repair a TV that is on sale with a 1 year warranty for $499 at Walmart with no waiting.
Assembly lines make things cheap, especially if the labor is cheap
Yep. Add to that, they give things short lifespans these days - for instance with cars, many of the cuffs and pumps and moving parts are now plastic because they assume car = 10 years. So the internal quality has gone downhill, it’s cheaper than ever to manufacture new, but taking a 10 year old car and replacing every plastic part with another plastic part that will also fail would cost a small fortune… just buy a new car. They very much assume you’ll be landfilling and rebuying in no time. Reparability went away when we became a disposable society.
Purpose-built automation increases the manufacturing capacity, making the scale even larger than it used to be. It also means the control circuitry can be made very compact and highly integrated. So there’s individual components failing are harder to identify and replace, and they can handle multiple functions so the device is notably more broken than and older device might have been when a component fails.
Most is economics of scale and mass production; repair is device & damage specific, which does not scale at all. Add exploitation of workers, just in time deliveries eliminating storage costs, the fact that transporting parts for 100 devices takes much more transport volume than 100 devices themselves…
a standout product is the steam deck: every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap. I don’t know how valve did it, but that should be the standard the industry should be aiming at.
every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap.
That’s part of the problem isn’t it tho? When products aren’t designed to be serviceable, let alone to be serviceable by someone not specialized, and spare parts aren’t easily available (not even at 3rd parties), your only option quickly becomes to just buy a new one.
A few years back I replaced the screen on my Xiaomi Mi5. Parts were okayish to order, and while I did succeed, I wouldn’t have called it doable by someone who’s not afraid to turn their phone into a glorified paperweight. And that’s only gotten worse since then.
Still, even for the Steam Deck as an example, which is probably the absolute closest we can get to the ideal case of the economy of repair, I’ve been hoping to buy every single individual part of the Steam Deck and assemble it into a complete Steam Deck myself for the fun and adventure of doing it myself (as someone who already had experiences repairing laptops), but everywhere I’ve looked it’s always more expensive to buy all individual parts of a Steam Deck, than buying one preassembled and officially sold. And this is not even counting the work hour it will take me to finish the process of building it.
But then again, there’s also the chicken and egg question involved in how exactly we got into a situation like this in our society these days.
Mass production and volume discounting. A circuit board can have hundreds of resistors on it. If yours has one resistor go bad you can buy a new one and replace it. But do you think it’s reasonable for you to get that one resistor for the same unit price as the company that orders a hundred million resistors a month?
For one thing, your one resistor takes about the same amount of labour and shipping costs as a tape reel of 10 thousand resistors (about the size of a dinner plate). So you’re already paying 10 thousand times the unit price on shipping and handling for that one resistor! For a manufacturer it’s not even worth their time to sell you 1 resistor. So you end up going through potentially multiple intermediaries before you can buy just 1. Each level of middlemen adds to the cost for you.
Yeah, there we get into the part where logistics for a lot of spare parts are simply more expensive than for a finished product. You need more storage space, you need more workers for that storage space, you need to keep track of a large amount of inventory, and you cant fully standardize packaging since different parts have different needs when shipped. If you want to make a buck out of that extra work too, we have the situation that the sum of the parts costs less than the parts themselves.
I once repaired my dishwasher. It cost me about £50 for a new pump, and many hours working out how to take the dishwasher apart and put it back together again. If I treated this as work, I would have been better off buying a new dishwasher, because I would have been paid more for those hours than the cost of a new dishwasher minus a pump.
Appliances are cheap relative to wages now, and repair still takes a lot of time. That’s the simple answer.
We have to consider why we want to encourage repair: it’s not simply true that we should always prefer to repair for its own sake. We should true to minimise greenhouse gas emissions or the use of resources that can’t be reclaimed, but not to the exclusion of all else.
If we had a carbon tax for example, it would somewhat increase the price of new goods and promote repair. But such a tax would not cause people to repair everything reparable - there would still be reparable items that are not economical to repair. This is a good thing though - if the carbon tax correctly embodies the externalities of producing emissions, then the choice to not repair it is a choice to do something else with people’s time. That time could be used on other productive things - maybe working to replace dirty fossil fuel infrastructure, or working to feed or entertain people, which are all things we want.
If we go the replace route. We should be looking at more refurbished equipment. Instead of an appliance going to a junkyard, a company/service would replace with a returned unit. Then take your broken one, fix/refurb that one and keep the cycle going.
But that takes labor, parts, storage, shipping, etc.
Let’s not forget the quality of the repair work. A lot of people may repair something but do it so poorly that they will have to deal with it again soon or it is unsightly. Repairing things is a skill, and when starting out people will fail or do a poor job.
I do all the repairs at my house. It takes a certain mechanical inclination for some things that many people don’t have.
Even if repair was encouraged it would take time to change how people think. As someone who does repairs I do notice how often people just ask for replacements instead even if it’s just a small easy thing to switch out. I tell them no, I fix it. That said, the things is repair is often fast and done in less than an hour if I have parts already.
The level of technical knowledge needed to repair things has increased, while general technical knowledge has decreased. People aren’t reading Popular Mechanics from the 1950’s where “build a hovercraft from an old lawnmower” the building one.
Parts are also a huge problem. Where previously a car alternator, for example, was three discrete parts, alternator-rectifier–voltage regulator, that is now a single assembly. If one of those parts goes bad you need to replace the whole thing, unless you have used parts you can pull from. For some things the assembly is NLA, no longer available.
As for why it’s cheaper that comes down to manufacturers wanting to sell you a new one, not wanting to have to spend money on repair stock sitting somewhere, and possibly not having access to it themselves since very few manufacturers actually produce a complete product on their own.
For something simple like a Bluetooth speaker, the power supply comes from one company, the Bluetooth module and amplifier from another, the driver, a display board, the housing, someone designs it and puts that all together. If any one of those chains fails you may not be able to source the part to fix something.
There are usually workarounds to this but unless you are doing it yourself it will be cost prohibitive
Example: friend rented a house with a new stove, gas top, electric oven. Two months later the oven stopped working, motherboard was NFG (no fucking good), it was also NLA. So the landlord bought a new stove. The old one could have been made to work, but the complete functionally would not have been there. If my friend owned this I would have said ‘I can make it work, but you will be missing these features’.
I’m one of those people that has the technical knowledge to repair most electronics. I still buy new sometimes.
A while ago, I had to repair a faulty pellet stove. It was obvious that the main control board was bad (there was a single small circuit board connected to a handful of relays and sensors, all of which tested as good). This board contained a small cheap microcontroller, a few MOSFETs, and a handful of discrete components. A replacement was $500. Maybe $10 in parts at the most, and they wanted to charge me half the cost of the entire appliance.
I was able to isolate the problem to a bad MOSFET and order a new one for about 50 cents. Had this been a complex circuit, there’s no way in hell I could have found the problem without a schematic.
So in my opinion, the problem is twofold. Manufacturers want ridiculous prices for replacement parts, and no documentation exists to repair the parts themselves. They obviously have schematics from when they designed the board. They should be forced to release them.
The lack of documentation is a huge problem, if you opened up an old tube amp to fix it there was often a full schematic taped to the cover. Solid state amps often had component values stenciled right on the board.
What’s your background that you’ve developed this knowledge? I fantasize about learning to do some of my own electronics repair, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’ve looked at trade school and continuing education programs and some online resources, but I don’t want to be an appliance repair guy. I just want to know which component to order and replace when my Japanese hot water boiler burns out.
Let’s take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer’s description of what is wrong, and you’re prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you’re confident in your diagnosis.
Your typical job looks like this:
- Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
- Drive out to the person’s home (30 minutes).
- Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
- Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
- Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
- Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
- Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
- Drive back to your office (30 minutes).
There, that’s 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn’t need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn’t have had to remove an old one.
Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn’t have to waste too much time driving from place to place.
Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you’re also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.
The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn’t until you’re up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.
For $500 devices, it’s gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.
This assumes that the owner hasn’t already attempted to repair it themselves
The point still stands. It takes a while to figure out how to repair something you have never repaired before. This assumes the person have the right tools at hand as well, and the correct replacement part.
Compare with a factory worker. They have assembled the same microwave thousands of times. They got everything they need at hand.
I was implying that the owner might have broken it even more when attempting the repair, making it take even longer.
Mostly because my washer started leaking and I’m probably going to break it more, too
But you might fix it - and if you break it more it was already broke so no loss
Making new
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Making something new requires simpler processes that are easy to automate.
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Making something new may involve the same series of steps done many times, so one can take advantage of economies of scale. You obtain raw materials or parts, and they’re all handled in the same way, many times over.
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You only need to deal with assembly, not disassembly.
Repair
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Devices don’t fail in the same way, so repairs tend to be unique and not amenable to taking advantage of economies of scale.
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Unless you repair a device in the same way multiple times, the scale is necessarily going to be less than manufacturing new, since if you manufacture N devices, you can’t be repairing more than N devices; again, not friendly to economies of scale. Even with things like automobiles that are designed with the intention of being easy to repair, older cars become increasingly less-practical to repair as the pool of cars of a particular year and model shrink over time as some become unrepairable and head to junkyards.
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If repair requires components, those components may need to be manufactured and then warehoused until repair is required, so the storage cost also adds to the cost of repair.
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Repairing is a complex process that likely differs from device to device that is hard to automate.
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Repair involves not just reassembly, but also disassembly.
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Especially if a device was not specifically designed to be simple to repair and especially if scale is not high, repair may involve (expensive) skilled labor from someone who has to be able to craft a specific repair process for this particular device being repaired.
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Repair involves diagnosis of the problem. Diagnosis may be an extraordinarily difficult process — e.g. trying to diagnose a failure inside of a chip without destroying it is something that we may not be able to do today, and the skillset or automated system required to do it may be very complex. Intel spent ages just trying to understand why there were failures in the last two generations of their chips, a situation where they didn’t care at all about destroying chips that they’d use for diagnosis, and they weren’t trying to repair a single chip, but to fix a process that involved huge numbers of chips. Maybe an electrical engineer could diagnose a problem on a device, but his work will repair only a single device. The time of that same electrical engineer could be used to improve a manufacturing process that could produce many more new devices.
Other
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When you repair a device, you get a device which may have other worn components. At some point, something else will fail. If you manufacture a new device, you get all new parts; you “reset the clock” on everything.
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When you repair a device, you get an older device. In many cases, due to the advance of technology, a newer device is preferable. That may not always be true — consider, say, an antique made by a specific artist centuries ago, where the value is in part that that particular person made the thing. But for most functional purposes, something made using present-day technology beats stuff made in the past. And that’s a more-important factor the greater the rate of advance in the field of whatever good it is that you’re trying to repair.
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Repair may compete with recycling.
We live in a world that, due to global trade and large population and probably access to interchange languages, has far more potential for scale than ever before in the past, so economies of scale can be pretty important — design a device once, make a very efficient process for making it, and you can sell to many, many people. Billions of people, even. You couldn’t do that a few hundred years ago, because the world was simply too disconnected. That’s a lot of potential for economy of scale. And economies of scale are, I think, generally more-friendly to manufacturing new.
I can’t think of many factors that would cause repair to become more-efficient versus manufacturing new relative to where they are today. I think that when we get AGI, we may be able to reduce the cost of skilled labor and complex automation, both used in repair, so far that repairing could see a bit of a renaissance. Maybe if we become a multiplanetary species in the future, travel into space and live elsewhere, then we’ll have small populations that are mostly cut off from the rest of the population, and economies of scale will greatly decrease, and repair will become more worthwhile — you fix something on Mars because there aren’t enough people on Mars for building new to make sense, and sending a new item from Earth costs too much. Maybe we’ll crash into fundamental physical limits and the rate of technological advance in many fields will slow way down, so a newer device won’t have many more benefits over an older device. Maybe some sort of new types of goods that are fantastically-expensive and only required in small scale will become increasingly important, and for them repair will be more important than for goods that are produced at large scale. But outside of that, I think that most of the factors will favor manufacturing new, and if anything, probably continue to do so even more than they do today.
Plus labor cost and transport. Repair locally and labor is much more expensive than in remote production. Repair remote-located for cheaper labor cost and you have to manage two-way transport, case management, with more concerns and distance, potentially increasing the mentioned issues of complexity and uncertainty mentioned.
Skilled or trained labor can be cheaper in remote locations, but that adds other concerns. Depending on the device under repair, customers may feel irritation when it leaves the country or “trusted countries” and with the time it takes.
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It only became cheaper to buy new over repairing the old because companies stopped producing replacement parts, and making things repairable.
If they never enshittified things to be unrepariable, repairing things would still be cheaper than buying a new one.
Encouraging people to repair things isn’t going to help much when a fuckton of things simply are not made in a way that they can even be repaired at home or even by the people who made the thing.
This is the cornerstone of a consumer economy. Planned obsolescence is also part of it, with the “next generation” of whatever becoming the “must have” thing. Consider the styling changes to cars, especially the tail fin wars of the 1950s, or the cell phone market today. My Pixel Pro 6 running Graphene OS completely fills my needs, though it’s 3 generations old.
This is why governments run by the people need to control corporations.
It’s more about industrialisation making new products really cheap. Think about a pair of trousers. They’re exactly as repairable as trousers ever were, and you can still get your trousers repaired economically. But the cost of a minor repair will total about half the price of a cheap pair of trousers. So there is little point repairing trousers unless they’re expensive - you may as well buy a new pair if they’re cheap.
This isn’t because of planned obsolescence, this is because clothing used to be far, far more expensive - you can come up with various multipliers but somewhere between 10x and 100x as expensive in terms of how many days of work was needed to pay for them. This is because industrialisation means that cloth and clothes can be made with a fraction of the labour as it did centuries ago.
Sewing machines have also made repairs much more efficient, but to a far lesser degree - someone doing clothing repairs has overheads beyond the limited bit of work that is sewing up a split seam or rip, which are almost non-existent for the business producing clothes in the first place.
So, if this is the case for simple items like clothes where repair itself is more economical nowadays, how much more true is it for complex items where each repair job is completely custom?
I have to wonder how much a needle and thread is where you are that buying a new pair of pants is cheaper than patching a hole/tear in the ones you already have. Clothing is one of the few things that doesn’t have this problem… But it also has an oversaturation problem so I could see pants being basically free in some parts of the world.
Part of the answer here is also integrated design. To be able to be repaired a thing has to be designed for that, and to have identifiable parts that can be adjusted or replaced in isolation, and non-destructive disassembly.
If you have to destroy one part to adjust another, it’s not really repairable. If several functions/components are all one thing then you can’t really replace just the one.
To use a bike as an example, you can exchange wires, brake pads, seats and most other things in isolation, especially the things that are expected to wear out and need replacement. But you’re not going to replace part of your bar tape or frame, because they’re essentially one whole thing.
(Ok, you could probably weld a steel frame if you really wanted to, but I think the intent is readable.)
It takes a huge shift in the US. There’s a stigma that if you don’t get new youre “a poor”. The funniest part is, the poorest people i know have a hatred for the poor. Like dude, you are 1 paycheck from being homeless but yes the homeless person is your issue not the tech billionaires.
Anyway, my mindset is the opposite in that im more disgusted by new and feel much happier with repair and reuse. But thats very rare. Not to mention late stage capitalism has made a lot of new stuff shit compared to old (cars, appliances, houses, consoles that don’t require Spyware and accounts to even play a single player offline game etc)
I got a 2007 miata. I’m doing everything i can to keep it running. I bought a manual and changed all the fluids and consumables. I’m also looking at an econobox electric like the Nissan leaf. If I can’t find something decent I’ll buy a early 2000s carburated motorcycle.
99 miata here too!
The funniest part is, the poorest people i know have a hatred for the poor.
I think people often hate things that remind them of things they don’t like about themselves
A few reasons.
First, ease of repair isn’t a major reason for people to buy certain products. Because consumers don’t purchase on ease of repair for a lot of products, it doesn’t get prioritized in design. The cost of screws over glue may not be worth it if only a small part of the customer base wants screws.
Second, an OEM supply chain is a cost that a lot of people don’t want to pay. It may be cheaper to replace or refund a product than create a supply chain to fix items.
Some of the reason is indeed due to fuckery such as companies intentionally making things difficult or illegal to repair, however part of it is also due to economic reasons. If you’re trying to assemble something in the most economical way possible, you’re probably not going to go out of your way to also make it more repairable. You’re going to use single-use fasteners like rivets, glue, tack-welds, etc. - all things that are cheap to assemble the first time, but at the expense of more difficult disassembly later on.
In addition, diagnosing problems may be expensive depending on the appliance or machine. Would you spend four hours of your time repairing a dishwasher that could be replaced for $300? For some people it may be worth it; for some, not. I personally will spend quite a bit of time trying to repair something rather than replace it, however that’s more of an ideological choice rather than an economic one.
