Planned obsolescence (Buy, throw away, buy)

Cosima Dannoritzer's documental that talks about the history of Planned obsolescence.

He is Marcos from Barcelona, but it could be anyone, anywhere else.

He will run across something that happens every day in offices and homes around the world.

A piece of the printer has failed and the manufacturer recommends taking it to technical service.

My technician makes a preliminary diagnosis,

but it costs 15 euros plus VAT.

Surely will be difficult find the pieces to be able to repair it.

Repairing it isn't really worth it.

Repairing it will cost about 110 or 120 EUR.

There are printers from 39 EUR.

I would advise you to look for new printers.

I would buy a new one, without doubt.

It isn't coincidence that the three vendors suggest to buy a new printer.

If he accepts, Marcos will be another victim of planned obsolescence,

the secret engine of our consumerist society.

Our role in life seems to be just to consume things with credits, to borrow money to buy things we dont need.

Our society is dominated by a growth economy

whose logic is not to grow to meet the needs,

but rather grow to grow.

If the consumer does not purchase

The economy is not going to grow

Planned Obsolencense

The desire on the part of a consumer to own something a little newer a little sooner than is necessary

In this documentary we will disclose how planned obsolescence

has defined our lives since the 1920s.

When manufacturers began to shorten the lifetime of the products to boost sales.

So they reduced the lifetime of products to 1000 hours.

We will discover that designers and engineers were forced to choose new values and goals.

It was back to the drawing board and come out with something that was more fragile

use it and throw it away

We will learn about a new generation of consumers

that are going against the manufacturers.

Is an economy without planned obsolescence feasible?

and without its impact on the environment?

Posterity will never forgive us

Posterity will find out about our throw away lifestyle

Buy, throw away, buy. The secret history of planned obsolescence.

The Livermore light bulb has been operating without interruption since 1901.

At the moment two webcams have expired and the light bulb is going for the third.

In 2001, when the bulb turned one hundred years old

Livermore organized a big American-style birthday.

The formula for a long lasting filament is not the only mystery in the history of light bulbs.

One much greater secret is how and why this humble product became

the first victim of planned obsolescence.

Christmas of 1924 day was a special day.

In Geneva several gentlemen in suits gathered together in a special room

with a secret plan.

They created the first worldwide cartel

to control the production of light bulbs

and distribute the world market shares among themselves.

The cartel was called Phoebus.

Phoebus included major light bulb manufacturers in Europe and the United States

and even those from distant colonies in Asia and Africa.

The objective was to exchange patents, to control the production

and, above all, control the consumer.

They wanted people to buy light bulbs on a regular basis.

If light bulbs lasted too much, it would be an economic disadvantage.

Initially the goal of manufacturers was a long lifetime for their light bulbs.

In 1881 Edison put up for sale its first light bulb, it lasted up to 1500 hours.

In 1924, when the Phoebus cartel was founded,

2500 hours of useful lifetime were announced with pride

and manufacturers highlighted the longevity of their light bulbs.

So the Phoebus cartel thought of limiting the lifetime of the light bulbs

to 1000 hours.

A committee was created in 1925, the "1000 hour life Committee"

to technically reduce the light bulbs lifetime.

More than 80 years after, Helmut Höge, a historian from Berlin,

finds evidence of the Committee activities

hidden among internal documents of members of the cartel.

Companies like Phillips in the Netherlands

Osram in Germany and Lamparas Zeta in Spain.

Here is a document from the cartel.

Pressured by the cartel, manufacturers performed experiments

to create a more fragile light bulb

that complied with the new 1000 hours standard.

Manufacturing was strictly controlled

to make sure that regulations were met.

One of the measurements was to mount different shelves

with many lampholders,

where they mounted different combinations with samples of each series.

Companies like Osram recorded meticulously

the duration of these bulbs.

Phoebus, created a complicated bureaucracy to impose their rules.

Manufacturers were severely fined if they diverted from the established goals.

Here is a table of fines of 1929

showing how much Swiss francs

the members of the cartel had to pay

if their bulbs lasted,

for example, more than 1500 hours.

As planned obsolescence took effect,

lifetime started to fall.

In just 2 years shrank from 2500 to less than 1500 hours.

In the 1940s the cartel had already achieved its goal.

A standard light bulb lasted for 1000 hours.

In the following decades, dozens of new light bulbs were patented.

Even one that lasted 100.000 hours.

But none was commercialized.

Officially, Phoebus never existed,

even though their trail was never completely hidden.

Their strategy was to change the name from time to time.

They were called "International Cartel of Electricity"

and later on they change it again.

The important thing is that this idea still exists as an institution.

In Barcelona, Marcos has ignored the vendors advice to replace the printer.

He is determined to fix it.

And he has found someone on the internet who has discovered what happened to his printer.

Marcos has contacted the author of the video.

Planned obsolescence started at the same time

as mass production and the consumerist society.

Already in 1928 an influential advertisement magazine warned:

".. an article which refuses to wear out is a tragedy of business."

In fact, with mass production, prices fell down

and products became more affordable.

People started buying for fun rather than by need.

The economy accelerated.

In 1929,

the Wall Street Crash abruptly stopped the incipient consumerist society

and led the United States to a deep economic recession.

The people formed lines no longer to buy, but instead to ask for work and food.

From New York came a radical proposal to revive the economy.

Bernald London, a prominent real estate investor,

suggested getting out of the depression through mandatory planned obsolescence.

It was the first time that the concept appeared in writings.

London proposed that all products had a limited lifetime

with an expiration date, after which these would be considered legally dead.

The consumers would return it to a Government Agency

for its destruction.

Bernald London believed that with mandatory planned obsolescence

factories would keep producing, the people would keep consuming

and there would be work for everybody.

Giles Slade is already in New York to know more about the person that is behind this idea.

He wonders if with planned obsolescence,

Bernald London aimed to maximize benefits or, to help the unemployed.

Dorothea Weitzner met Bernald London in the 1930s during a family outing.

In fact the idea of Bernald London passed unnoticed

and mandatory planned obsolescence was never put into practice.

Twenty years later, in the 1950s, planned obsolescence resurfaced,

but with a crucial twist, it wasn't to force the consumer but to seduce him.

This is Brooks Stevens' voice, the apostle of planned obsolescence

in the post-war america.

This elegant industrial designer, created from electrical appliances

to cars and trains, always taking in mind planned obsolescence.

In tune with the time, the designs of Brooks Stevens expressed speed and modernity.

Even his house was unusual.

Brooks Stevens traveled throughout the United States

promoting the planned obsolescence in talks and speeches.

His ideas settled and were widespread.

Design and marketing seduced the consumer

to always want the latest model.

Freedom and happiness through unlimited consumption, the American way of life of the 1950s

settled the foundations of the current consumerist society.

Nowadays, planned obsolescence is taught in design and engineering schools.

Boris Knuf gives lectures about product life cycle.

The modern euphemism of planned obsolescence.

Students are taught to design for a business world dominated by a single goal:

frequent and repeated purchases.

Planned obsolescence is in the root of the considerable economic growth

that the Western World has lived since the 1950s.

Since then, growth has been the Holy Grail of our economy.

We live in a society of growth

whose logic is not to grow to satisfy the needs

but grow to grow.

Infinitely grow, with a production without limits

and to justify it, consumption should grow without limits.

Serge Latouche, a well-known critic of the Society of Growth,

writes often about its mechanisms.

There are three key instruments:

advertising, planned obsolescence and the credit.

The critics of the Society of Growth alerts that it is unsustainable in the long term,

because it is based on a flagrant contradiction.

Anyone who believes that unlimited growth

is compatible with a limited planet

is either crazy

or is an economist.

The problem is that we are all economists.

We could say that with the Society of Growth

we are inside a race car

that, right now, clearly nobody is driving,

going full speed

and whose fate

is either hitting a wall

or falling into a precipice.

Consulting instruction manuals,

Marcos realizes that engineers

determine the lifetime of many printers, during the design phase.

They achieve it by putting a chip inside the printer.

I found the chip.

It is an EEPROM chip where

a count of prints is stored.

When it reaches a determined number,

the printer hangs and stops printing.

What do engineers think when they have to design a product that fails?

The dilemma is reflected in a classic British film of 1951

where a young chemist invents a everlasting thread.

The chemist believes that he made a great progress.

But not everyone likes the invention,

and soon he finds himself chased not only by the owners of the factory

but also by the workers who fear for their jobs.

In 1940 the giant chemist Dupont presented a revolutionary synthetic fiber:

the nylon.

For women the durable socks were a major step forward

but the joy lasted a little.

Dupont's chemists had reasons to be proud

even the men admired the resistance of nylon stockings.

Dupont gave new instructions to Nicole Fox's father of and his colleagues.

The same chemists that applied all their knowledge to create a durable nylon

embraced the new trend and made it more fragile.

That everlasting thread disappeared from factories,

like in the film.

What was the opinion of Dupont's chemists about deliberately reducing the lifetime of a product?

Planned obsolescence affected not only engineers.

The frustration of consumers echoed in the classic play of Arthur Millers:

Death of a salesman.

Like Willy Loman, the consumers could only complain.

Consumers didn't know that in the other side of the Iron Curtain,

in the countries of the Eastern block

there was an entire economy without planned obsolescence.

The Communist economy was not based on the free market, but it was planned by the State.

It was inefficient and suffered from a chronic lack of resources.

In that system, planned obsolescence did not have any sense.

In the old East Germany, the most efficient communist economy,

the norms stipulated that fridges and washing machines should last for 25 years.

I bought this fridge in East Germany in 1985,

it is at least 24 years old.

I never had to change the light bulb

which is also nearly 25 years old.

In 1981 an East Berlin's factory began to produce a long lasting light bulb.

They presented it in an international fair, in search of western buyers.

When the East Germany manufacturers

presented these long lasting light bulbs

at Hanover fair in 1981,

their colleagues in the West said: "You will be without jobs."

The engineers of East Germany said:

"No, the opposite,

we will keep our jobs

if we save resources and do not waste tungsten."

The people of the West rejected the light bulb.

In 1989 Berlin Wall fell,

the factory closed and the production of the long lasting light bulb stopped.

Nowadays, it can only be seen in exhibitions and museums.

20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, unrestrained consumerism

exists both in the East and in the West.

With a difference, in the internet age,

the consumers are willing to fight against planned obsolescence.

Elizabeth Pritzker, a San Francisco lawyer, heard about the video

and decided to sue Apple on the matter of the iPod battery.

Half a century after the case of the cartel, planned obsolescence

came back to courts again.

A lot of these iPods had problems with their batteries

and their owners were willing to go to court.

One of them was Andrew Westley.

In December 2003 Elizabeth Pritzker presented the lawsuit

to San Mateo County's Court.

A stone's throw away from Apple's headquarters.

After months of tension, the two parts reached an agreement.

Apple created a replacement service and extended the warranty to 2 years.

The prosecutors received a compensation.

Planned obsolescence causes a constant flow of waste

that end in Third World countries, like Ghana in Africa.

An international treatment prohibits shipping electronic waste

to the Third World countries.

But buyers use a simple trick:

they declare them as second-hand products.

More than 80% of the electronic waste that arrives in Ghana

can not be repaired and end up abandoned in landfills around the country.

Nowadays, here there are no children playing after school.

Instead, young people from poor families, come to look for scrap.

They burn the plastic cable cover to obtain the metal inside.

The smallest kids scavenge in the wreckage to find

any piece of metal that the adults might have forgotten.

People from all over the world has begun to act against planned obsolescence.

Mike Anane is fighting at the end of the chain,

he has begun collecting information.

Mike thinks about turning this information into evidence

for a lawsuit at court.

Marcos is in internet again, looking into how to lengthen the lifetime of his printer.

A russian website seems to offer a free software

for printers with a counter chip.

The developer has bothered to explain his personal motivation.

Marcos does not know what can happen, but decides to download the software anyway.

From a small village in France, John Thackara fights against planned obsolescence

helping people around the world to share business and design ideas.

One of them is Warlden Phillips, descendant of the dynasty of light bulbs manufacturers.

Nearly a century after the light bulb cartel,

Warner Philips continues the family tradition, but with a different perspective,

produces a led light bulb that lasts 25 years.

If the carriers paid the real cost of transport,

not to mention that the oil is a non-renewable resource

and for which there is no substitute,

I would say that the costs would be multiplied by 20 or 30.

Also we can fight against planned obsolescence

rethinking the engineering and the production of the products.

A new concept: "Cradle to cradle".

Asserts that if the factories worked as the nature

obsolescence itself would be obsolete.

When we talk about protecting the environment,

we always think about: cut, resign, reduce.

But in spring, a cherry tree

neither cut nor resigns.

The natural cycle produces in abundance,

but the fallen flowers and dry leaves are not waste,

but nutrients for other organisms.

Nature don't produce waste, only nutrients.

Braungart believes that industry can imitate the virtuous cycle of nature.

And he proved it by re-designing the production process of a Swiss textile manufacturer.

When you upholster a sofa with a textile like this

the clippings are so toxic

that should be removed alongside the toxic waste.

Braungart discovered that the factory used by inertia hundreds of

highly toxic dyes and chemical products.

To produce the new textiles, Braungart and his team reduced the list

to only 36 substances.

All of them biodegradable.

We select ingredients that you could eat.

If you'd like, you could add them to your muesli.

In a society of wastefulness,

a short-life product creates a problem of waste.

If a society produces nutrients,

short-life products could turn into something new.

For the more radical critics of planned obsolescence,

it is not enough to reform processes,

they want to rethink our economy and our values.

It is a true revolution, a cultural revolution,

because it is a change of paradigm and mentality.

This revolution is called: Degrowth.

Serge Latouche travels from talk to talk explaining

how to abandon the Society of Growth once and for all.

The Degrowth is a provocative slogan

that tries to break up with the euphoric speech

about viable, infinite and sustainable growth.

It attempts to demonstrate the need for a change of logic.

The essence of Degrowth

can be summarized in one word: reduce.

Reducing our ecological footprint,

the over-production and the over-consumption.

To reduce the consumption and production,

we can release time

to develop other types of wealth

that have the advantage of not exhausting themselves with use,

like friendship or knowledge.

If happiness depends on the level of consumption,

we should be absolutely happy,

because we consume 26 times more than in Marx's time.

But polls show

that people are not 20 times happier,

because happiness is always subjective.

The Degrowth's critics fear that it will destroy the economy

and take us back to the Stone Age.

Returning to a sustainable society,

whose ecological footprint is not bigger than a planet,

does not mean going back to the Stone Age, but back to the 1960s,

considering the parameters of a country as France,

which, is not the Stone Age.

The society of Degrowth makes Gandhi's vision a reality:

"The World is big enough

for everyone's needs

but it is too small

for the greed of one man."

Marcos is installing the Russian freeware on his computer.

With the new program he can put the printer chip counter to zero.

The printer is unlocked immediately.

The end?