On obsolescence

The Tyee's James Glave interviews author Giles Slade on the spread of planned obsolescence, and the resulting environmental problems:

How do obsolescence and disposability interrelate? And did the initial architects of disposability foresee the issue of waste?

Disposability was first created with paper clothing products, like paper shirt-fronts, collars and cuffs. You'd take off your shirt collar at the end of the day and stick it in the stove, and it was gone. It was only later that metal watches and Gillette razor blades started going into landfills. Once disposability was invented, then planned obsolescence could occur. We had invented mass production, and we had to feed the machine -- we had to get people to buy new stuff -- and obsolescence emerged as the answer. Waste was simply the after-phenomenon...

Which one single invention stands out in your mind as the killer app of obsolescence -- the one product that prompted or compelled us to chuck its predecessor, with grim consequences?

It hasn't happened yet but it's just about to. By 2009, the FCC [the U.S. Federal Communications Commission] will have mandated the complete change from analog to digital television. All the older TVs have cathode-ray tubes that contain maybe five to 10 pounds of lead. Television enjoys a 95 per cent market penetration in the United States, which would mean that, conservatively, there are about 300 million of them out there in living rooms and dens and basements. And they are about to be chucked. The sheer amount of toxic lead that is about to enter the waste stream is simply going to overwhelm it -- there are not enough container ships to send these obsolete televisions off to Asia where they can be broken up safely. This is a massive biohazard that is about to enter America's groundwater. And it is going to happen because electronic manufacturers lobbied the FCC to mandate digital TV. The problem for them was, there is not enough obsolescence in the television market; they are built to last five to seven years. That was too long...

Are we to blame, or is industry?

A lot of it is simply greedy IT manufacturers. In Europe, they have passed laws that make sure that electronic manufacturers can't use toxic substances in devices when they manufacture new things. They have to pay to back the old ones and disassemble them and reuse them.

Governments and companies would do the same thing here if we demanded it. But we don't. Why not?

We have become creatures of conscious self-display. You are what you drive or wear. You are the model Blackberry that you use. Life used to be better when things weren't that reductive. There is a sense of entitlement that we suffer under that doesn't exist in other cultures -- one that really makes us weaker. I am the last person who wants to give up my car, and I don't want my kids to go without food. But we are doing all this on credit, and I don't think it is going to last.

All too often lost in the rhetoric surrounding economic growth and/or productivity is any analysis of how growth is obtained - both in determining which products are actually needed to support a standard of living, and which ones could be built to support a higher standard in the long term. Unfortunately, it's hard to be optimistic that North America will follow Europe's lead anytime soon in giving any weight to the value of sustainable resource management as compared to the impulse to sell another wave of new, soon-to-be-obsolete products.