Buy for Life

 

There is a movement, one that I have only just found out about (and feel silly for not knowing), called Buy for Life. Instead of buying a pair of $10 shoes once a year, you buy one pair of expensive shoes that will last yours and your grandchildren’s lifetime. Just like that sewing machine that my Grandmother owned, these products, while expensive to begin with, are quality and made to last. The movement optimises the revolutionary action against planned obsolescence, and consumer culture, and is the antithesis of The Philosophy of Futility.

Who does Buy for Life benefit?

The environment: With less products being made, less resources are used for mass production, and less waste through production, consumption and disposal, ergo the environmental impacts are low.

Small business: By supporting small, ethical or local designers, farmers, makers, etc., we create jobs, culture and a style, that mass production takes away from us.

People: We SAVE money by spending money.

Say for 60 years, we buy a pair of mass-produced, $15 shoes and replace them per year (taking into account after our feet have stopped growing and we start buying our own shoes etc.). That’s $900 per year we spend on shoes. That’s just for one pair per year though… I’m not ashamed to admit I have more than one pair of shoes.

Instead if we bought a pair of $200 shoes, made using quality products and methods, they could potentially last us our lifetime.

This is an extreme case, however, I’ve found numerous pairs of quality italian leather shoes at the local op-shop that have been worn for someone else’s lifetime that I now use. I have had them resoled or elasticised but they have lasted.

Question about the philosophy:

What is the impact of reducing mass production on local communities?

Actually, this is a contentious issue that I have not researched but feel as thought it is incredibly important – if anyone knows, I would love to hear from you. What happens to a community who relies heavily on jobs in factories and mass-production when that company is taken away. Many unskilled labourers would be out of work and would put themselves and their families at risk of worse living or working conditions. How can this be done in a sustainable way for the community? Can we implement and increase minimum wages and working conditions? Can we make companies sign ethical business agreements? Can this be aligned with environmental impacts and protection clauses to reduce the use of natural resources and the amount of waste?

 

Where can you buy for life or find out more? Here.

 

 

The Checkout

The Checkout After reflecting with friends on our views on consumerism, this incredibly witty satirical consumer affairs series was brought to my attention. Presented by some of Australia’s most notorious comedic investigative journalists, the series sheds light on issues within our consumer culture, how marketing, statistics and language is used to persuade us to buy. Such a show, some even appropriate to air with upper primary students, is integral to creating awareness about a culture that underpins our society, and one where we are being positioned into naivety. The most recent episode I watched investigated the different formulas of Nurofen and whether “targeted pain relief”, and different formulas for different pains was something that could be scientifically plausible; it’s not. Spoiler alert, the Nurofen marketing team has created a pink packet for “period pain” and a red packet for “back pain”, but within those capsules the formula is identical.

However this wasn’t the most interesting aspect for me, it was that since Nurofen is now widely available in supermarkets instead of having to be prescribed or as an over-the-counter medication, pharmaceutical information is not available to those who were buying the pain relief. Therefore it was up to us, the customer, to use our discretion as health care dummies to make choices. So where before, a chemist would recommend the generic brand and allowing us to choose on the basis of price, now we are at the mercy of the marketing teams of the drug companies, being positioned to pay twice as much for the same chemistry. This is modern consumer culture: our naivety and laziness is being capitalised on by big business, and then being used against us to convince us to buy more.

But, as always, education could provide the key to overcoming such a poisonous culture. By educating ourselves and our students, we can understand our behaviours and where they stem from, and create awareness to make better choices about where and how we buy. That’s why these TV shows are so important because, without creating a “we’re all doomed” feel, they enlighten us.

Reference:

The Checkout (2013) Buy Now Pay Forever (video). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfNqBP900L8

e-waste

So many reusable parts here. All that glass, just to begin with!
However instead of being able to replace small unsustainable parts, planned obsolescence dictates that we replace the whole machine to simulate our economy. But who pays? The environment does with the vast amount of e-waste we produce.

The Bureau of Statistics (2013) estimates that “of the 15.7 million computers that reached their ‘end of life’ in Australia in 2007-08, only 1.5 million were recycled – that’s less the 10%” and that If 75% of the 1.5 million televisions discarded annually were recycled there would be savings of 23,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalents, 520 mega litres of water, 400,000 gigajoules of energy and 160,000 cubic metres of landfill space (para. 1).

Imagine a conveyor belt with products constantly falling off the end: this is our model for consumption. Where does the waste go? How do we get rid of it? Out of sight, out of mind…

Reference:
The Bureau of Statistics (2013) Waste Account, Australia, Experimental Estimates, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/4602.0.55.005~2013~Main+Features~Electronic+and+Electrical+Waste?OpenDocument

“Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence”

Planned obsolescence is a term first coined in the title of Bernhard London’s pamphlet “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence” in 1932. In his essay, London suggested a regulatory to be imposed by the government which would subject all consumer products to a pre-defined, limited lifespan after which the product would have to be replaced. Upon caught using beyond their expiration date, he suggested, consumers should even be penalized. His intentions were motivated by the idea, that a major cause for the Great Depression in the 1930’s were consumers’ habit of “using their old cars, their old tires, their old radios and their old clothing much longer than statisticians had expected” [15].

 (Glaubitz, J. P. A., 2011, pg. 3)

London’s concept, while seemingly ridiculous to the critical reader, are widely accepted and calculatingly encouraged by big business. How many times has your iPhone mysteriously stopped working? How long do our appliances last for before we have to replace them? We replace products and a HUGE rate every year (Annie Leonard explains this in the Story of Stuff video). I own a sewing machine that my grandmother brought over to Australia from Switzerland during the second world war. The machine, powered by electricity, belonged to my mother after my grandmother and has now been passed onto me and still works!

So how did we end up with products that lose their efficiency or cease to function within six months of the purchasing date?

The answer lies in a consumer culture. Big companies have a monopoly on the market; they created it and dictate how that market will move. Where big business positions consumers, over time, to want; they convince us we need the newest model, with better battery life, and more functions: “Technology is changing at a rapid pace, we need to catch up to it”, they tell us, and we listen! Our printer requires new cartridges when the old cartridge is half full, and we have to oblige because we don’t know better.

References:

Glaubitz, J. P. A., (2011, July 15). Modern consumerism and the waste problem. Retrieved from http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~glaubitz/mnses9100_essay.pdf