Is It Time To Get Tough On Shit Products?

A few weeks ago I brought some colour changing light bulb from Amazon, no doubt shipped from some dystopic Chinese sweat shop. Supermarkets charge exorbitant amounts of money for their energy saving bulbs these days, so the idea of buying a replacement that both changes colour and plays music through an internal speaker for only twice the price of a 'normal' shop brought bulb seemed like a bargain.

Or was it?

As you might expect by the title of this post, the quality wasn't the best. Within ten minutes of installing the thing it broke, and I was stuck with a disappointed toddler and an expensive lump of plastic which by now is sitting in a landfill somewhere. This is hardly a rare occurrence these days, and we should be demanding answers. So much emphasis has been put on recycling over the past few decades, but very little is done to point out that a race to the bottom in production costs has probably caused more waste than anything else.

I hate to think just how much raw material gets wasted each year by the cheap shit sold online these days that breaks within the first six months.

Now I'm not detracting or downplaying the need for greater recycling infrastructure, but I find it very strange that there isn't greater moral outrage towards merchants selling goods which seem to have no quality checks at all. In all seriousness, I think manufacturers and the large importers (like Amazon) should be forced to offer long-term warranties on all of their products, with the threat of heavy fines for selling products which fail to live up to consumer's expectations.

I'll also point out that something ought to be done about corporations like Apple or Samsung who habitually release new products every five minutes and deliberately create compatibility issues in order to drive more sales. If I had it my way there would be environmental legislation to prevent this sort of aggressive planned obsolescence. Why can't products be upgradable anyway? It wouldn't be too much of a push to make a modular phone or laptop that you could buy plug and play replacement parts for. If anything, that's the kind of innovation that should be incentivised. With a bit of luck, the rise in 3D printing might make replacement parts cheaper and more accessible, but I guess that'll only become a reality if there is a conscious push by the public to do so, which is unlikely if manufacturing processes become cheaper and make our throwaway society even worse.

Unfortunately it seems these massive corporations like Amazon, Samsung or Apple, have too many friends in high places for these kind of laws or ideas to be implemented. If the car manufacturer Tesla is a sign of things to come in our potential Corporarchal future, then we won't even be able to fix our vehicles ourselves without the threat of legal action or being remotely shut down.

Obviously there will be consumer activists out there who will moan and say that doing anything like what I've suggested would only cause an increase in prices. Well good! And yes, that might seem a bit hypocritical given that I began this post complaining about the prices of things in shops but in truth, I think that anything 'cheap' in today's society quickly becomes a false economy. For example, I found tools in my shed left behind by the previous homeowner which were probably made sometime in the 1970s by British factories and are very much still usable today. Were I to buy their Chinese equivalents today I'd be lucky to get a few years use out of them before handles started falling off or shards of shitty Chinese alloys embedded themselves into my face.

Prices going up wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing so long as quality and lifetime increased. In addition, an increase in lifespan and prices would also drive second hand sales which theoretically (at least by my likely flawed logic) would reduce manufacturing demand even more. In my eyes that seems like a much more efficient way of reducing waste than solely pushing for better recycling.

Of course half of these issues wouldn't exist if globalist arseholes hadn't pushed to de-industrialise the West in the first place and move the global manufacturing base to China where products have little regulation and factories have little concern for the environmental impact. For the changes I've suggested to be implemented we would need worldwide cooperation on something that goes against the interests of the already rich and powerful and goes against the ingrained throwaway mentality of the public in general. Sadly few of us have the power to change that right now, but its something which will no doubt need to happen in the near to mid-future.