A Life Less Throwaway: The lost art of buying for life

How did they get away with it? Many of the changes were sold to consumers as efficiencies and improvements in brightness. And despite lasting less than half as long as the older lightbulbs, the new ones were often even more expensive.

The companies profited enormously from their tactics; one reported that their sales had increased fivefold since they’d changed their designs to be more delicate.

The cartel was disbanded during the Second World War, when it became a little awkward for German, British and American businessmen to get together. But the damage had been done; the life expectancy of bulbs didn’t recover.

I recently had the pleasure of talking to several people who work in the lightbulb industry today. When I shared the story of the 1924 Phoebus Cartel, they said that in many ways things were no better now.

One engineer told me that one of the most underhanded tactics she’d witnessed recently was bulbs being sold with an advertised life of seven years but purposefully designed so they would only last two or three years, just long enough to avoid customer complaints and returns. And this company was a major player in the lightbulb world.

‘They’re lying to us,’ she said bluntly. ‘The lightbulb industry is full of misinformation. I’ve run independent tests on bulbs and some of them are running so hot there’s no way the components inside them will survive the time the packaging says they will.

‘There are all sorts of cheats going on. For example, “15,000-hour lifetime” might be written in large print on the front of the box, while “one-year guarantee” might be written in small print on the back. And then you get guarantees that are only valid if the bulb is used for one to two hours per day.’

This misinformation has sadly stopped genuinely good bulbs from succeeding, as customers can’t see the difference.

One scene from The Light Bulb Conspiracy which filled me with dread was footage of a teacher in a design college handing out various products to his students and asking them how long they thought they were designed to last. ‘It’s important for you to know,’ he said, ‘because you’ll have to design to a certain lifespan and to the business model the company wants.’ This is particularly disheartening, as he’s teaching the next generation of designers not to make the best products they can, but ones that last as long as they need to for the company to sell them.

Beyond bulbs

By the Fifties, obsolescence was fully grown and had left home to travel the world. Now its influence can be seen everywhere, from the furniture left outside to be picked up in Europe to the mountains of electrical waste in Asia.

In the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties voices did start being raised about the need for products to last longer to avoid an environmental crisis, but governments and businesses chose instead to concentrate their efforts on recycling.

Recycling is a positive thing and certainly takes away the guilt we feel about discarding something. But the truth is the environmental difference between being able to carry on using something and recycling it is colossal. Recycling still takes energy, waste collection and processing, and usually manufacturing a new object to replace the one we are discarding. This suits companies very well, but we and our planet end up paying the price.

So here we are. The calls for longer-lasting products have been ignored for decades, planned obsolescence reigns supreme and the commercial world is steaming us blindfold into an iceberg of trash.

QUALITY STRIPPING

We’ve all experienced quality stripping, and I’m not talking about particularly adept G-string jiggling. If ‘building it to break’ is the famous poster child of planned obsolescence, ‘quality stripping’ is probably the most common tactic used. It’s being done to products all over the world, all of the time, and it’s not even being denied, it’s just being explained away.

In the spring of 2017, I was invited to the wilds of Yorkshire to visit Morphy Richards, a prominent British home appliances firm. I was thrilled that they were open to talking about longevity, as every other company I’d spoken to was quick to be defensive about the issue. I took the opportunity to question them about why things didn’t last as long as they used to.

‘I’ve been told by an engineer friend,’ I said, ‘that it isn’t necessarily that things are built to break, but that every year you might be asked to take more costs out of the product, so the materials get thinner and cheaper and the quality starts to come down. Is this true?’

‘That’s exactly it,’ they agreed. ‘It’s all about cost. With enough money, we can make you something that lasts as long as you want, but we have to hit a certain price to please the marketers and retailers.’

This all sounds quite reasonable, but the effect of it is not. There is solid evidence that appliances are breaking earlier and earlier. In fact, the number of appliances that must be replaced because of breakage has doubled since 2004. Most shockingly, boilers used to last a wonderful 23 years in 1980, but are only expected to last 12 years by 2020.

There is also a heartbreaking disconnect between the people who design and make the products and the people who make the decisions to forego quality. Engineers are craftsman and generally want to make the highest-quality products they can. But many businesspeople see manufacturing companies purely as money-making projects. Whether they make hairdryers or hamburgers makes no difference to them.

The cost-cutting decisions might not even be made by the company that makes the product but by an “umbrella” company which owns a lot of brands. That company may be so far away from the making of the actual product, they may not even know what it looks like. But they can still demand that the engineers find a way to make it 10 per cent cheaper than they did the year before. You can’t do this for long before the lifespan of the product is affected.

‘Companies have become increasingly short term in their thinking,’ admitted Thor Johnsen, who has been in the business of buying, selling and managing other companies for many years. ‘They’re greedy for a quick buck, and short-term greed produces massive problems. Companies will put nearly all their money into their branding and marketing, spend a bit on design and then build their products as cheaply as possible. That’s the model now.’

‘Why are they getting away with it?’ I asked.

‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘shoppers might say they want quality when we ask them, but when we watch them, they don’t actually buy for quality. They buy for convenience or price.’

‘Do you think part of the trouble,’ I suggested, ‘is that people go into a shop and see a row of products and can only guess which one lasts the longest? So they end up going for what’s cheapest or what goes best with their kitchen.’

‘Yeah, that might be it,’ he said. ‘Branding used to help us know which was the best quality. But that’s just not the case anymore.’

So far, so depressing. And this isn’t the end of the bad news. Have you ever noticed that sometimes online reviews look as though people are talking about entirely different-quality products, even while reviewing supposedly the same item? Of course different people have different expectations, but several engineers have told me that with so many products being made overseas, there is a temptation for factories to secretly change the quality of the products after the first couple of batches. The factories win the business by making something great, but then start cutting corners. Or everything but the corners. Unless these products are then tested, they make it into the shops and quickly into landfill.

This isn’t only annoying and wasteful, but also sometimes incredibly dangerous. Tyres might be made with cheaper-quality rubber which explodes at high speeds, or the paint used on toys might be switched for a cheaper toxic lead variety.

One of the most shocking findings was that a shipment of aluminium construction materials, crucial to holding up a building, was found to have decreased in weight to under 90 per cent. All of the profits from that saved aluminium would have gone to the factory owner. All of the responsibility for the danger and the cost of recalls would have gone to the company that sold it. It’s almost impossible to sue a Chinese factory, and because companies like to keep their suppliers secret, the factories don’t have to worry too much about damaging their reputation.

The British appliance company I visited is very aware of these problems, so anything that comes in from overseas is tested by them in their own lab.

‘Nothing comes out of here alive,’ said the head of the lab gleefully as he showed me around. Kettles were boiled, poured, filled and boiled again, boiled dry and abused with mechanical arms. Toasters were tortured – popped and popped and popped again until they broke. Irons were slid over miles and miles of rough denim to ensure that their plates could take the strain of years of use.

‘The factories in China know we do this,’ I was told, ‘so they know they can’t get away with sending over inferior products. If it fails here, it doesn’t go to market.’

Most companies can’t afford their own testing facility, however, so we’re often left at the mercy of unscrupulous manufacturers, some of whom are happy to take our money and give us poison and trash in exchange.

If you’re reading this and thinking it’s as depressing as an empty toilet-roll holder, I apologise. It is depressing, but it’s also important to know what we’re up against, so we can know how to combat it. There’s a section at the end of this chapter on how to do just that.

MAKING IT UNFIXABLE – OBSOLESCENCE IN DISGUISE

One scorching August day in 2016, I invited my friend Tom Lawton over to look at toasters. Tom is a rather bizarre combination of engineer, inventor and TV presenter, and I set him the challenge of looking into how six different toaster brands were made and how that might affect their longevity.

‘What we’re looking for,’ Tom said, ‘is the weakest link. A product is only as good as its worst flaw.’

We looked at the toasters to get an insight into the choices that engineers have to make: the materials used, how a product is put together, and areas where the durability is being comprised. One of the things that immediately jumped out at us, though, was how hard these toasters were to get into. Some even had special star-shaped security screws. One did come apart eventually, exposing a jagged metal edge which cut Tom’s hand open. These toasters were clearly not designed to be taken apart.

Some manufacturers do this to protect themselves. If a member of the public fixes a product and it goes wrong, it can be a PR disaster for the brand, so you can see where this defensive thinking comes from. At the same time, being sold products that are designed to be unfixable (even by a trained engineer like Tom) has conditioned us to feel helpless when things break. So when their weakest link fails they are seen as ‘dead’ and destined for the big scrapheap in the sky (or sea … or slum).

Smartphones are perhaps the most notorious for this. Their weakest link is their battery, and the makers know it, but some of the brands make it impossible or prohibitively expensive for people to replace the battery. When it goes, often the whole phone goes. There’s been some backlash over this, but in general we’ve rolled over and accepted the situation. Perhaps seduced by having an excuse to buy the newest model?

But by preventing us from replacing the battery, the manufacturers are limiting the whole phone’s life to the life of the battery. Imagine your car tyres wearing out and the manufacturer telling you that you might as well buy a whole new car. This is essentially what many technology companies are doing right now.

Phones aren’t the only products that have come under fire recently either. A 2015 investigation into washing machines by Which? (the UK’s number one consumer magazine) showed their design had changed over time ‘and not for the better’. Now they’re made with the drum and bearings sealed inside, meaning that if the bearings go (one of the top five reasons for a breakdown), we have to replace the entire drum, which may cost around £200. If the machine’s out of warranty, we’ll generally be told it’s not worth fixing and we should buy a new one.

When manufacturers were asked why they now sealed in their drums, they claimed it made the machines more reliable. However, the most reliable brand, Miele, doesn’t seal its drums, so this excuse feels as suspicious to me as finding a feather in my cat’s bed. It’s clear something nasty has happened …

WHAT TO DO?

The emotional and financial toll of having something break on you is often not thought about, but whenever a vital product breaks it brings an added level of stress into your life. It can even trap low-income families into a cycle of poverty, forcing them to pay out again and again for shoddy appliances. Some might say that it is the duty of businesspeople to put profits first; however, as I sit here writing this in 2017, I would argue that to put profits before people and planet is dangerous, short-sighted, selfish and just plain rude. Fortunately, as consumers, we do have some power if we know how to use it.

When they build it to break

• Get angry and demand more. According to a report on product durability, when it comes to small appliances, we’re upset if something lasts less than three years and satisfied if it lasts 7.7 years.

I think we should expect better. If something has a simple function, like to boil water or toast bread, there’s no excuse for it not to last for decades. The fact that we’re happy with less is worrying – we’ve been trained to expect poor longevity.

• Look out for petitions to change the law in your country. France already has a law to prevent planned obsolescence, and a director of any company caught in ‘built to break’ tactics can now go to jail for two years and face a fine of up to €300,000 or 5 per cent of the company’s revenue. I believe this should be the law worldwide, and I’ll be fighting to make that happen.