The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [133]
The explosion of manufactured products in the trash will hardly come as a surprise to most people who live in the United States. Consumer goods are so plentiful and relatively cheap that it honestly is easier and cheaper just to replace Stuff than to repair it. We all have dozens of examples of this fact. When my VCR (remember those?) broke, it cost $50 just to have a repair guy look at it, while a new one that played DVDs as well only cost $39. The zipper on my fleece jacket broke. It cost $35 to have a new one sewn in, for which I could have easily bought a replacement jacket. The earphones for the little $4.99 radio I got at RadioShack broke. Big surprise, eh? No problem, I thought. I can just replace them with something from my drawer of parts salvaged from other broken electronics. No such luck. The whole radio was in one piece, connected without screws or snaps, so if any one part broke—the dial, the case, even the ear bud—it couldn’t be replaced or repaired. According to Consumer Reports, at least a fifth of the appliances (dishwashers, washing machines, gas ranges) sold between 2003 and 2006 broke within three years, while more than a third of those refrigerators with ice machines and dispensers needed service in that amount of time.27
I had to replace my decades-old refrigerator last year and was consoled only by how much more energy efficient its replacement was. But from day one the icemaker didn’t work. The repair guy came out three separate times to deal with it in the first ninety days, after which the warranty ran out and he stopped coming. By the third visit, we had gotten to know each other a bit. He shared with me his frustration at the electronic gadgetry that is a mainstay in today’s fridges now—some even have flat-screen televisions built into the door. He sighed: “I am a refrigerator repairman, not a computer technician, certainly not a television repairman.” I asked him how long this fridge would last, hoping I’d at least see my fourth grader through college before having to replace it again. “They used to last twenty, thirty years,” he said, “but nowadays you’re lucky to get five out of them.” I asked him why that was. He pulled his head out of the freezer, paused, looked at me, and said, “Ya know, it’s funny. It’s kinda like they want you to buy a new one faster.”
That’s the norm in the United States today. Since not many people are involved in making this Stuff anymore, few people know how to repair any of it, even the repair guys! The combination of our inability to repair things plus the ease of replacing them makes us mistake a lot of perfectly good Stuff for waste. Elsewhere in the world there are definitely places where repair is still the default response. My Bangladeshi friends keep their clothes for a long time and update the cut as fashion dictates, since most of them know how to sew, and there are also inexpensive seamstresses in every neighborhood. When furniture upholstery fades or tears, the fabric—rather than the whole chair or couch—is replaced. All over India, there are small shopkeepers, sometimes just sitting on a blanket on the sidewalk, who expertly repair clothes and shoes and electronics. In India, I ripped a pair of blue jeans across the knee. I took them to a tailor whose shop was an elevated cement platform, about one square meter, on a side street in Calcutta. All day