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EU Parliament Calls For Longer Lifetime For Products (eubusiness.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe's Parliament called on the Commission, Member States and producers Tuesday to take measures to ensure consumers can enjoy durable, high-quality products that can be repaired and upgraded. At their plenary session in Strasbourg, MEPs said tangible goods and software should be easier to repair and update, and made a plea to tackle built-in obsolescence and make spare parts affordable. 77 per cent of EU consumers would rather repair their goods than buy new ones, according to a 2014 Eurobarometer survey, but they ultimately have to replace or discard them because they are discouraged by the cost of repairs and the level of service provided. "We must reinstate the reparability of all products put on the market," said Parliament's rapporteur Pascal Durand MEP: "We have to make sure that batteries are no longer glued into a product, but are screwed in so that we do not have to throw away a phone when the battery breaks down. We need to make sure that consumers are aware of how long the products last and how they can be repaired."
As long as people are willing to pay 2-3x the current cost, they can have a TV with replaceable parts and the infrastructure required to support it. Of course, many people won't be able to buy these products, but boy howdy, if they do, it will really be great.
Being a US Citizen, I feel I am being dragged into some backwards Theocratic Police State where the common person has no rights, has no say and is there to serve solely as a profit center for the All Mighty Capitalists
In the EU, they proactively look after the interests of their people and society
Sure, they pay higher taxes and they ave plenty of downsides, but I find that far more acceptable than living in the US
Hit the manufacturers with a "life cycle tax" to cover the true cost of the ENTIRE life cycle of the product - including disposal in a landfill or the ocean.
Pros: You'd be able to repair a lot of stuff because it'd be cheaper to sell. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch(es) would stop growing pretty quick. McDonald's Happy Meal toys would either be made of wood or disappear altogether.
Cons: Implementing it would be difficult - full of more regulations to comply with. And stuff would go way up in price. McDonald's Happy Meal toys would either be made of wood or disappear altogether.
77 per cent of EU consumers would rather repair their goods than buy new ones
And what percentage would be willing to pay significantly more for those repairable products than they are paying now for the non-repairable versions?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The study in question was in relation to major household waste management. 77% of respondents said they would "make an effort to get broken appliances repaired before buying new ones." {Emphasis Mine} It was a study about the home, food waste, plastic waste, and general appliances. I too would put every effort into getting a dishwasher repaired. I just drove my coffee machine to the other side of the city for that reason too.
However I couldn't give two shits about my smartphone, tablet, or any other device with glued in batteries, or batteries in general. Most of these status symbols will be replaced while in a perfectly working condition. I applaud the idea behind the repairability rules, but if you don't back it with the right study you will not find the support you need to tackle this issue, an issue which manufacturers will fight.
Being someone who spent a number of years repairing Other People's Broken Shit (and profited intellectually thereby, believe it or not; knowing how things break and how they could be made better is of great practical use), I appreciate and agree with the sentiment behind this from the EU, but as with so many things technological, the politicians in this case don't have an appreciation for the technical problems associated with it. Many of the devices they'd like to be repairable aren't manufactured in a way that makes them easily repairable in the first place. Much surface-mount component technology itself makes it almost impossible to diagnose problems down to the component level (BGA packaged integrated circuits especially). Then there's the cost associated with diagnosis and repair of a circuit board; in many cases it might cost more to do that than a new unit would cost. Changing the way things are manufactured to facilitate repair might not be possible, at least without going backwards, having devices that are larger and bulkier, so that repairs can even be made. As-is, some devices can be 'repaired' just by replacing an entire circuit board, which while it irks my sensibilities is the most cost-effective solution; defectives can either be recycled or repaired in bulk in a factory setting for much cheaper than as a one-off. Your smartphone, on the other hand, is more-or-less one circuit board to start with, is very densely packed with components, most/all of the VLSI ICs are BGA packages, and the PCB itself might not even survive the removal/replacement process, even if you can manage to diagnose the problem; there's no real way to make them repairable short of replacing entire assemblies, which in many cases might cost more than half of what a new smartphone costs. Many other portable devices are in the same boat. Appliances, vehicles, $LARGE_THINGS? There's little reason why they can't be made repairable, it's just company policies that prevent it (I'm looking at you John Deere). I'd hope that the EU is really going to target that class of 'device' than any other.
"The government needs to stay out of free market economics" means that someone has no idea under what conditions a free market works. For a free market to work it is necessary that the rules balance the power between the different actors on the market. One often overlooked problem is that normally, consumers know much less about the products they are buying than the manufacturers and the sellers. While consumers need many different products of very different product classes and need to have a very broad knowledge about virtually everything, manufacturers and sellers can specialize on their sector of the market and thus have a big informational advantage, which they leverage in contract negotiations. Many regulations thus are concerned with consumer protection and try to shift the balance of power away from the manufacturers and sellers which have to adhere to very strict rules to stop potential or real abuse of their negotiational power.
Colt's great contribution was to the use of interchangeable parts. Knowing that some gun parts were made by machine, he envisioned that all the parts on every Colt gun to be interchangeable and made by machine, later to be assembled by hand. His goal was the assembly line. This is shown in an 1836 letter that Colt wrote to his father in which he said,
The first workman would receive two or three of the most important parts and would affix these and pass them on to the next who would add a part and pass the growing article on to another who would do the same, and so on until the complete arm is put together.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If I break the screen on my iPhone given how it's built it's easier and less expensive(?) to go out and buy a new iPhone. If the battery stops holding the charge I need to get a new iPhone because the current one is glued in. The point is that the phones and other items like it should be manufactured so that if something goes wrong to a component like one of those then it should be easy to take the phone in to be repaired. It would be nice to be able to upgrade your storage after purchasing a phone but they aren't even calling for that.
If there was something wrong with anything on the motherboard then you would just take out the board and replace it with an new one. Even that is a lot better than replacing the whole phone. But it's hard to do when manufacturers use special screws and slather glue everywhere.