SOCIAL: Fwd: Introducing iPhone 4.

Tue Jun 8 15:39:46 PDT 2010

Geoff
You may be right to a certain extent, but many things now are DESIGNED to die after 10 years such as home appliances.  Why? Because companies like O'Keefe and Merritt and Wedgewood built ovens and stoves that were built to last ...and they went out of business.  No one needed to replace them.  We have an O'Keefe and Merritt stove that must be at least 70 years old and it's way better than most new stoves.  Sometimes I think simple technology is where it's at.  
And as far as repair of appliances, yes, skilled, but only modestly skilled.  Our old stove needs a tune up every now and then.  But new appliances have little computers in them that if they go you've got to replace the whole machine since replacing the computer is almost as much as a brand new machine.  The rest of the appliance is in perfect working condition, but out it goes.  Sad.
And cheaper - to get your old stove repaired every 5 years or more it may cost $100-200, as opposed to $500-1000 to replace with a new one (that will only last another 10 years at best).  
And cost, the real cost of production is hidden - consider environmental degradation, human health, etc, in the countries where most of these things are made.  It's a high price, we're just not paying for it.  Someone else is.  
Kelly, I think many of the points you make are very true.  I just think there are too many things out there that are built to expire expressly for short term financial gain.  And it's depressing.
Thanks, Palak, for opening up this thread.  I appreciate it and feel similarly.
amy t.
From: drainage at gmail.com
To: geoff at geoffdavis.net
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 23:16:54 -0700
CC: social at deeptrouble.com
Subject: Re: SOCIAL: Fwd: Introducing iPhone 4.

Geoff,
You're misunderstanding term cradle to cradle -- not your cradle -- the product's.  
Looking forward to the day I can grow my latest phone :)

Adrian
On Jun 7, 2010, at 10:03 PM, Geoff Davis <geoff at geoffdavis.net> wrote:

Thinking about the kinds of phones that were available when I was in the cradle, it would make me very sad if I were stuck with a cradle-to-cradle phone.  I'd be lugging around a 10 pound stainless steel rotary dial phone with 500 yards of really heavily reinforced cord while everyone else rocked out on their iPhones.

I think it all boils down to this:Fixing stuff is really expensive because it requires skilled labor (expensive).Making new mass produced stuff is cheap because the skilled labor all happens in the design phase, and the design cost gets spread out over everything you make.

Until that changes, it's going to be a lot easier to make new stuff than to fix existing stuff.

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Tom Radulovich <tomrad at well.com> wrote:

I would feel better about so much of this stuff if it was recyclable or compostable. If computers are only supposed to last a few years, why not a compostable casing, like hardboard, instead of toxic beige plastic? Same thing with the semi-disposable furniture. What if the particle board furniture could be composted once the furniture fell apart? Coating particle board with Melamine resin precludes that.

I'd happily buy a cradle-to-cradle iPhone.

On Jun 7, 2010, at 6:55 PM, Kelly hawk wrote:

I may be quoting out of context and misattributing... but I believe one of the national leaders of the german Green party once said "commerce is bad for the environment." AKA, the less we buy, the better off the earth is. So the fact that my employer sells anything at all is in some sense bad for the environment, even if they made toilet paper from grass. But the desire for new powerful phones exists, some company will fill it. It might as well be as recyclable as possible. 

I think desktop computers have reached the point of diminishing returns on frequent churn. I have useful PC's in my home that are nearly 10 years old and will probably continue to be useful for another 5 or 10 - new desktops today don't do much more than the old ones. They're just faster with bigger screens, so making durable desktops make sense. Someday phones will hopefully get to the same place, and it will be appropriate to make cell phones that could last 10-15 years. It makes no sense to make a phone that durable today; technology is changing too quickly, so the extra material that went into making it durable would be wasteful for the majority of customers. Likewise with furniture and real wood. If you want nice furniture that you'll own the rest of your life, it'll cost $4,000 and it'll be hard wood (I have several such pieces, and I intend to have them reupholstered until I can't see anymore). Otherwise, it'll be made from cheap pressboard (which is generally post-consumer waste, or at least waste the mill will have burned if not for pressboard). Seems like reasonable environmental harm reduction.

-- Kelly --

On Jun 7, 2010, at 5:56 PM, Erin Milnes wrote:

I had to part with my Mom’s Sunbeam mixer, as it just couldn’t cream butter anymore (it had had a good run, maybe even 35 years). Really made me sad, though -- I learned to bake with it as a girl by her side (and got to lick the batter off its beaters!). I also had to give up on my stepmother’s old ‘portable’ Singer, when it couldn’t be reliably repaired, but it, too, was probably 40 years old.

Don’t get me started on shoes and clothing. I have dresses that are probably 40 and 50 years old and look fine, and my son has worn some of my brother’s baby clothes, which I know are 50 years old. I even have two blouses that belonged to my grandmother, who was born in 1895. They are delicate but still wearable. I have shoes and clothes that I bought as a teenager, too. Have several of my Mom’s old aprons ... the list goes on.

And furniture... what happened to building with real wood? Press board doesn’t last, and you can’t give it away after a few years. (Sal Army will not pick up press board furniture donations.)

The esprit de corps around keeping and reusing definitely seems to be different now than it was when I grew up and when I was a young adult. I think there’s also a bit of a West Coast thing going on (too hard to schlep antiques across the country). Maybe my family was unusual, maybe it’s a Midwestern thing, or maybe because I grew up with a grandmother who guided her family through the Depression (including dealing with losing their house), the belief that waste is sinful was instilled in me.

There’s no doubt that obsolescence is planned into many products and plain old low-quality is the rule for most others. I like to feel the years in a tool and touch those memories when I hold it, though there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a new outfit or gadget too. It’s important to have a balance. Tom, I think your earlier caution about consumption is very on the mark.

I’m not sure why/how the values around consumption and waste in this country have changed so much since I was a kid, but maybe we can all spiral back to less waste-creating beliefs in an even better form.

Erin

From: social-bounces at lists.deeptrouble.com [mailto:social-bounces at lists.deeptrouble.com] On Behalf Of Tom Radulovich

Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 5:26 PM
To: Social
Subject: Re: SOCIAL: Fwd: Introducing iPhone 4.

After I sent this, I looked around at the dead electronics in view, and tried to imagine the tons and tons of water, oil, coal, ore, trees, etc. that went into making them, and the tons of carbon dioxide, soot, mine tailings, fly ash, hydrocarbon sludge, etc. that they left as waste; it would fill the room I am in several times over - perhaps the entire building! Sobering.

Then I think about my aunt's KitchenAid mixer, or my grandmother's chairs, flour sifter, and rolling pin, which still serve me well although they are all older than I am. 

Some folks are thinking about designing things in very different ways. Worldchanging had an article about designing for durability and continued usefulness –  "heirloom design" which I quite liked. Think about a fine pen or a watch you can imagine leaving to your grandchildren (or grandnieces and grandnephews)

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009630.html

I imagine that at some point, technology will stabilize, and many devices will do pretty much everything you need them to do, and do it elegantly. Apple makes quite elegant products, if not particularly durable ones. Maybe one day there will be the mobile phone equivalent of the KitchenAid mixer, that will last for decades.

On Jun 7, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Amandeep Jawa wrote:

What Tom said is how it is.

I will only add that that is why Apple has very consciously moved to making things out of high grade aluminum and glass rather than plastic.  We have pointed out numerous times that we do this because these materials (particularly the high grade versions we use) are sought after in recycling because they are the most valuable.

I'm not saying that is everything, but it is something.

On Jun 7, 2010, at 4:40 PM, Tom Radulovich wrote:

It's an excellent point, Palak. These machines are the product of a culture that plans in obsolescence. Even if you want to hold on to them (as I do, not necessarily out of virtue, but rather because I am cheap, and don't like to have to learn how to use new gadgets) they aren't made to last, or the company that makes them quickly stops supporting them. As I write this, I am sitting in an office with four non-working printers that need to be disposed of. I just took a bunch of mobile-phone chargers to Goodwill for electronics recycling yesterday, and was reminded of how wasteful (and expensive!) it is that every phone seems to have a unique charger – while I understand that the EU now requires that all phones sold in Europe from now on have a standard charger, it seems a way off here in the US.

I started reading John Thackara's book, In the Bubble, which is about design. He has a great chapter on how much waste that the electronics industry generates:

"Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It's a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed sillicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory - a total of 630 times the mass of the final product. The "fab" of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip's weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. A single microchip is, it is true, a small thing – on its own. But there are a lot of them about – and many more to come. Promoters of ubiquitous computing promise us that trillions of smart embedded devices are on the way.

" The ecological footprint of computing is not limited to the chips. The manufacture of electronic devices also involves highly intensive material processes. A great deal of nature has to be moved during the production of communications equipment. Many components require the use of high-grade minerals that can be obtained only through major mining operations and energy-intensive transformation processes. One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins' Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the consumption or production of a computer ends up rather quickly as either an emission or as solid waste. In theory, electronic products have technical service lives on the magnitude of thirty years, but thanks to ever-shorter innovation cycles, many devices are disposed of after a few years or months."

On Jun 7, 2010, at 3:55 PM, palak joshi wrote:

I am not sure if i am supposed to feel like this but I do anyway.  Maybe someone will have an explanaiton that will make me feel better.

I do understand evolution and how things get better with time..after usage and with new technology. But i cant help but get a little upset over the fact that the iphone that i had excitedly bought a couple of years ago is now 'outdated'. It doesnt have any of the things that 4 g (right) have!

Am I supposed to stay committed to my existing phone (its cracked!) or go for the better one? When does one 'settle down' with a technology...does that happen when one dies or when one doesnt have any money ...and to me both sound like extreme.

What is the fine line between consumerism and getting excited with new technology? I have had these qustions bother me many times...I would love to talk about it if any body else feels the same way..if not i will wait around for the next topic on social  :)

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Amy Muller <amymuller at gmail.com> wrote:

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