Understanding Planned Obsolescence

This is Marcos from Barcelona, but he could be anyone, anywhere. What is about to happen to him occurs daily in offices and homes all over the world. A part inside the printer has failed and the manufacturer sends Marcos to technical support. My technician makes a diagnosis, a preliminary diagnosis, but this diagnosis is 15 euros more than it was. It will be difficult to find the parts to repair it. Really, repairing it is not very easy. To repair it we are talking about 110, 120 euros. You have printers from 39 euros. I would advise you to look for new printers. So, without a doubt, I would buy a new one. It's no coincidence that all three shopkeepers suggest buying a new printer. If he agrees, In a few years, Marcos will become yet another victim of planned obsolescence, the secret mechanism at the heart of our consumer society. Our role in life seems to be just to consume things with credit, to borrow money to buy things we don't need. We live in a society dominated by an economy of growth, whose logic is not to grow to meet needs, but to grow to grow. So if the consumer does not purchase, you know, the economy is not going to grow. Plan of Solicitors. The desire on the part of a consumer to own something a little newer, a little sooner than is necessary. This film will reveal how planned obsolescence has defined our lives ever since the 1920s, when manufacturers started shortening the lives of products to increase consumer demand. We will find out how designers and engineers were made to adopt new values and objectives. Back to the drawing board. and come out with something that was more fragile. They time those things. They time them. So when you finally paid for them, they're used up. A new generation of consumers has started challenging manufacturers. Is it possible to imagine a viable economy without planned obsolescence, without its impact on the environment? Posterity will never forgive us. Posterity will suddenly find out about the throwaway lifestyles of people in the advanced countries. Welcome to Livermore, California, home of the longest burning light bulb in the world. My name is Lynn Owens and I am chairman of the Light Bulb Committee. It was in 1972 when we discovered that the lightbulb that was hanging in the fire station was a significant lightbulb. The lightbulb at the Livermore Fire Station has been burning continuously since 1901. Ironically, the bulb has already outlasted two webcams. In 2001, when the Bowl was 100 years old, the people of Livermore threw a big birthday party, American style. I think we were hoping if we would get 200 people we'd be happy, and we ended up with eight or nine. hundred people showing up. You think that anybody would sing happy birthday to a light bulb. Well, we didn't think they would but they did. Happy birthday dear Whitehall. Happy birthday to you. The origin of the bulb was it was produced in a town called Shelby, Ohio, back around 1895, and put together by some very interesting ladies that I have some pictures of, and some gentlemen that invested in the company. The filament was invented by Adolphe Chalet. He invented his filament to last. Why does his filament last? I don't know. It's a secret that he made and that died with him. Chalet's formula for a long-lasting filament is not the only mystery in the history of the light bulb. A much bigger secret is how the humble light bulb became the first victim of planned obsolescence. Christmas 1924 was a very special day. In a back room in Geneva, some gentlemen met in striped suits to follow a secret plan. They founded the first cartel worldwide, which aimed to control the blueberry production of the entire country and to divide the cake called Weltmarkt. This cartel is called Phobos. Phoebus included the main light bulb manufacturers in Europe and the United States, and even faraway colonies in Asia and Africa. ...firmly and normally......the conditions of great stability... Thomas Edison's first commercial bulb, on sale by 1881, lasted 1,500 hours. By 1924, when the Phoebus Cartel was founded, manufacturers proudly advertised lifespans of up to 2,500 hours and stressed the longevity of their bulbs. So, at Fögus, we thought, we would simply limit the life span of these individual light bulbs to 1000 hours. In 1925, a committee was founded, the 1000 Hour Life Committee, which aims to limit the life span of the light bulbs to this burning time on a technical basis. More than 80 years later, Helmut Hüge, an historian from Berlin, uncovers proof of the committee's activities, hidden in the internal documents of the founding members of the cartel, such as Philips in Holland, Osram in Germany, and Compagnie des Loms in France. Here we have a cartel document that says the average life of lamps for general lighting service must not be guaranteed, published, or offered for another value than 1,000. always. Under pressure from the cartel, member companies conducted experiments to create a more fragile bulb that would conform with the new 1000 hour rule. Phoebus enforced its rules through an elaborate bureaucracy. Members were fined heavily if their monthly life reports were off the mark. Here we have a penalty table from the year 1929, which shows exactly how much Swiss franc penalty for 1,000 sold light bulbs the members of the cartel have to pay if the lamps last longer than, for example, 1,500 hours. As planned obsolescence took effect, lifespans fell steadily. In just two years, they dropped from 2,500 hours to less than 1,500 hours. By the 1940s, the cartel had reached its goal. 1,000 hours had become the standard lifespan for bulbs. I can see how this was very tempting in 1932. I think at the time sustainability was actually substantially less of an issue because I don't think they looked at the planet as being one with finite amount of resources. They looked at it as from an abundance perspective. Ironically the light bulb has always been a symbol for ideas and innovation and yet it's one of the early and best examples of planned obsolescence. The following decades, inventors filed dozens of patents for new light bulbs, including one lasting 100,000 hours. None of them reached the general market. Officially, the Föbus never existed, even if these traces of the public were never completely hidden. The strategy behind it is to rename itself over and over again at certain times. Then it's called International Electricity Cartel, then some other name. It is crucial that this idea as an institution continues to exist. In Barcelona, Marcos hasn't followed the advice of the shopkeepers to replace his printer. He's determined to repair it and has found somebody on the internet who has discovered what has actually happened to his printer. It's the dirty little secret of inkjet printers. I tried to print a document and it said parts inside your printer require replacement. So I decided to do a little servicing of my own. Hello Marcos, I've got your message. Marcos has contacted the author of the video. I looked into it and it turns out that there's a thing in the bottom of the printer called a waste ink reservoir. And the way inkjet printers work is they constantly have to clean the print heads and they do that by squirting ink through them down a hole in the bottom of the printer into this great... Big sponge. There's just a preset time when it's squirted a certain number of drops down there that then the printer decides it's full of ink and won't function anymore. The justification is they don't want to put ink all over your desk. But I think the problem goes deeper than that. It's the way the technology works. It's just designed to fail. Planned obsolescence. emerged at the same time as mass production and the consumer society. The whole issue with products being made to last less long is part of a whole pattern that began in the Industrial Revolution when the new machines were producing goods so much more cheaply, which was a great thing for consumers, but consumers couldn't keep up with the machines. There was so much production. As early as 1928, an influential advertising magazine warned that an article that refuses to wear out is a tragedy of business. In fact, mass production made many goods widely available. Prices fell and many people started shopping for fun rather than meat. In 1929, the emerging consumer society came to a full stop when the Wall Street crash sent the US into a deep economic recession. Unemployment reached staggering proportions. By 1933, one fourth of our labor force was unemployed. People no longer queued for goods, but for work and for food. From New York came a radical proposal on how to kickstart the economy again. Bernard London, a prominent real estate broker, suggested ending the depression by making planned obsolescence compulsory by law. It was the first time the concept was put into writing. Under Bernard Linden's proposal, all products would be given a lease of life with a set expiry date, after which they would be considered legally dead. Consumers would turn them over to a government agency where they would be destroyed. He was trying to achieve a balance between capital and labor where there would always be a market for new goods. So there would always be a need for labor and there would always be a reward for capital. Bernard London believed that with compulsory planned obsolescence, the wheels of industry would keep turning, people would keep consuming, and everyone would have a job. Giles Slade has come to New York to investigate the person behind the idea. He wants to find out if for Bernard London, planned obsolescence was purely about profits, or about helping the unemployed. I have a picture of Bernard London. Dorothea Weitzner remembers meeting Bernard London in the 1930s during a family outing. Don't tell me which one he is. Okay, okay. Let's see. Oh, isn't that interesting? Yes, definitely. intellectual looking. And you met Bernard London in 1933. When I was about 16, 17, my dad and mother had this big Cadillac car, which was the size of a Zeppelin. Mother was driving. She liked it. chauffeur dad was in the front and mr. mrs. London were in the back of the big limousine dad said that mr. London should explain his philosophy to me he's very interesting man and he just told me in a few words that was his idea to reduce the depression we were in an economic mess worse than today even was obsessed with this idea like an artist is utterly obsessed with his paintings you know he actually whispered to me in the car, afraid that his theory might be too radical. In fact, Bernard London's proposal was ignored, and obsolescence by legal obligation was never put into practice. 20 years later in the 1950s the idea resurfaced but with a crucial twist instead of forcing planned obsolescence on the consumers They were to be seduced by it. Planned obsolescence. The desire on the part of a consumer to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary. We certainly in America... This is the voice of Brooks Stevens, the apostle of planned obsolescence in post-war America. This flamboyant industrial designer created everything from household appliances to cars and trains. always with planned obsolescence in mind. In the spirit of the times, Brooks Stevens'designs conveyed speed and modernity. Even the house he lived in was unusual. This is the home that my father designed and that I grew up in. When it was being built out in the suburbs, everybody thought it was going to be the new Greyhound bus station because it did not look like a traditional home. One of the most important things that my father felt always in designing a product is that it made a statement. He detested products that were bland and really did not create any desire within the consumer to inspire the purchase. Unlike the European approach of the past where they tried to make the very best product and make it last forever, meaning you bought such a fine suit of clothes that you were married in it and then buried in it and never a chance to renew it, the approach in America is the same. is one of making the American consumer unhappy with the product that he has enjoyed the use of for a period, have him pass it on to the secondhand market, and obtain the newest product with the newest possible look. Brooke Stevens traveled all over the U.S. to promote planned obsolescence in speech after speech. His approach became the gospel of the time. Women and men alike are increasingly interested in the look of things. They eagerly give their attention to what's new and beautiful and advanced. Music Design and marketing seduced consumers into always craving the latest model. My father never designed a product to intentionally fail or become obsolete for some functional reason in a short period of time. Planned obsolescence is absolutely at the consumer's discretion. No one is forcing the consumer to go into the store and purchase a product. They go in under their own free will. That's their choice. Freedom and happiness through unlimited consumption. The American way of life in the 1950s became the foundation for the consumer society as we know it today. There wouldn't be any products, there wouldn't be any industry, there wouldn't be any designers, architects, there wouldn't be any salespeople, cleaners, there wouldn't be any security guards, all the jobs would go. How often do you change your mobiles? Once a year. These days, planned obsolescence is an integral part of the curriculum at design and engineering schools. Boris Knouf lectures on the concept of product-led design. life cycle, a modern euphemism for planned obsolescence. I went shopping for you. I've got a couple of things. A pan, salt, shirt, another shirt. Students are taught how to design for a business world dominated by one single goal, frequent repeat purchase. What I do, I pass these around and you tell me what you think, how long it takes for them to fail, what the service life will be. Okay. Designers have to understand what company they work for. The company decides on a business model how often do we want to renew our products, our offers. So this brief is given to designers and designers have to understand and design the product in a certain way so it fits exactly the business strategy of the client they work for. Planned obsolescence is at the root of the substantial economic growth that the Western world has experienced since the 1950s. to increase consumption without limits. There are three fundamental instruments. which are advertising, programmed obsolescence, and credit. Critics of the Growth Society point out that it's unsustainable in the long run because it's based on a flagrant contradiction. Those who believe that infinite growth is compatible with a finite planet are either crazy or economists. The drama is that we are all economists now. Why is it that a new product is created every three minutes somewhere in the world? Is this necessary? I think a lot of people have realized that things need to change when they're being told by politicians to go shopping or to start consuming as the best way to restart the economy. We can say that with the growth society, we are embarking on a bolide that now obviously has no pilot, but that is going at full speed and we can predict the fate of either crashing against a wall or falling into a prison. precipice. Looking at the service manuals of different printers, Marcos realizes that the lifespan of many printers is set by the engineers right from the start. I found this chip, an EEPROM, which is a chip that saves an inspection account. And when a certain account arrives, it's when the printer is locked and stops printing. How do engineers feel about designing products to fail? The dilemma is captured in a British film from 1951 where a young chemist invents an everlasting thread. But not everyone is happy with his discovery and soon he finds himself on the run not only from the factory owners but also from the workers all fearing for their jobs. Well that's really interesting and it reminds me of something that actually happened in the textile industry. In 1940, the chemical giant DuPont announced the arrival of a revolutionary synthetic fiber, nylon. Girls celebrated the new long-lasting... stockings but the joy was short-lived my father worked for DuPont before and after the war in the nylon division and he told me a story about how when nylon first came out and they were trying it out for use in stockings the men in his division were asked to take these stockings home for their wives and girlfriends to try out My father brought them home to my mother and she was delighted with the first products because they were so sturdy. The DuPont chemists had every reason to be proud of their achievement as even men touted the strength of nine on stockings. The problem was they lasted too long. The women were very happy with the fact that they didn't get runners in them. Unfortunately, this meant that the companies producing the stockings were not going to sell very many. DuPont gave new instructions to Nichols Fox's father and his colleagues. The man in his division was back to the drawing board to try to make the fibers weaker. And come out with something that was more fragile and would run so that the stockings wouldn't last as long. The same chemists who'd applied their skills to make durable nylons went with the spirit of the times and made them more fragile. The everlasting thread disappeared from the factory floor, just like in the cinema. We need control of this discovery. Complete control. If you want twice the amount in that contract, we will pay it. A quarter of a million. Just suppress it. Yes. How did the chemists at DuPont feel about deliberately reducing the life of a product? Excuse me. It must have been frustrating for the engineers to have to use their skills to make an inferior product after they'd tried so hard to make a good product. But in a way, I suppose, that's the outsider's view. Probably they just had a job to do. Make it strong, make it weak. That was their job. Engineers were in a really complicated ethical time. This confrontation with planned obsolescence provoked them to examine their most basic ethical concepts. There was an old school of engineers who believed that they should make a pro... usable product that would never break and there was a new school of engineers that were driven by the market who were clearly interested in making the most disposable product that they could and this debate resolved itself by these new school of engineers taking over planned obsolescence did not only affect engineers the frustration of ordinary consumers is echoed in Arthur Miller's classic play Death of a salesman. Just like Willy Lomax, all consumers could do was complain powerlessly. Once in my life, I'd like to own something outright before it's broken. I'm always in a race with the junkyard. Just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. Refrigerator. Consumes belts like a crazy maniac. They time the... those things. They time them, so when you finally paid for them, they're used up. Little did consumers know that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, there was a whole economy without plants. land obsolescence the communist economy was not ruled by the free market but centrally planned by the state it was inefficient and plagued by chronic shortage resources in such a system planned obsolescence did not make any sense In former East Germany, the most efficient communist economy, official regulations stipulated that fridges and washing machines should work for 25 years. Here, this DDR refrigerator, I bought it in 1985. It is at least 24 years old and the light bulb is just as old, I have never changed it, so it is almost 25 years old. In 1981, a lighting factory in East Berlin launched a long life bulb. The western buyers rejected the bulb. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The factory was closed and the East German long-life bulb went out of production. Now, it can only be found in exhibitions and museums. Many years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, consumerism is as rampant in the East as it is in the West. But there is one difference. In the age of the Internet, consumers are ready to fight against planned obsolescence. The first movie we made that really broke through was a movie about the iPod. I was completely broke when I had gotten this iPod. It was like 500 bucks, 400 bucks. And about 8 months later, 12 months later maybe, the battery died in it. And I called Apple to ask them to replace the battery. And their policy at the time was to tell their customers to buy a new iPod. You might as well go get a new one. Apple doesn't offer a new battery for the iPod? No. It wasn't that the battery died that was annoying, because in my Nokia cell phone, the battery dies, you buy a new battery. Even in my Apple laptop, when the battery would die, you replace the battery. But in the iPod, this expensive piece of hardware, when the battery died, you had to replace the entire unit. So it was my brother's idea to make a movie about, Without just that, we went around with a stencil spray painting on every iPod advertisement we saw in town. iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months. We put the video on our own little site, iPodsdirtysecret.com. The first month, six weeks, it was at 5, 6 million views, and the site went absolutely bananas.. A lawyer in San Francisco, Elizabeth Pritzker, heard about the video and together with her associates, decided to sue Apple over the lifespan of the iPod battery. Half a century after the lightbulb case, planned obsolescence was in court again. When we brought this litigation, this was two years after the iPod was introduced, Apple had sold about three million iPods nationwide in the United States. Many of the three million iPod owners were having battery problems and were willing to sue. One of them was Andrew Wesley. We selected from amongst the consumers who had called us individuals who would serve as representatives in a class action. A class action is really a device that's fairly unique to the United States where a small group of people stands in the shoes of a large group to bring one claim before a court. My role in that... case was as class representative on behalf of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people. The case came to be known as Wesley versus Apple. When my friends and family learned that this was a major case, they thought I was, you know, becoming a radical. You know, here I am, gonna sue, you know, I was the next Erin Brockovich. In December 2003, Elizabeth Pritzker filed the case at the San Mateo County Court, just a few blocks from the Apple headquarters. We asked Apple for a number of technical documents regarding the battery life in the iPod, and we received a lot of technical data about the battery design, about the testing of the battery, and learned through that discovery that the type of the lithium battery that was contained within this iPod was designed, by design, to really only have a short period of life. I do think that Apple's development of the iPod was intended to be one of planned obsolescence. After a tense few months, both parties hammered out a settlement. Apple set up a replacement service for the batteries and extended the warranty to two years. The claimants were offered compensation. One thing that really bothers me personally is that Apple really promotes itself as a young, hip, forward-thinking company. And for a company like that not to have a good environmental policy that allows consumers to return products for proper recycling and disposal is really counterintuitive and counter to the reality. their message. Planned obsolescence produces a constant stream of waste which is shipped to third world countries such as Ghana in Africa. It's been between 8 and 9 years now when I noticed that loads and loads of containers were coming to this country with electronic waste. We're talking about end-of-life computers, end-of-life television sets, which nobody wants in the developed countries. Shipping electronic waste to third world countries is forbidden by international law. But the merchants use a simple trick. They declare the waste as second-hand goods. More than 80% of the electronic waste that arrives in Ghana is totally beyond repair and whole container loads are abandoned at dump sites all around the country. We are at a dump site here in Agbor Gloshi. In the past, we had this beautiful river called the Odo River, you know, that meandered its way through this area. It was teeming in the past. It had so much fish. We actually attended a school not very far away from here. So we'd come play football and hang around the river. The fishermen would organise boat rides, I remember very well. But now it's all finished, it's all gone. And that makes me really, really sad. And it makes me angry. These days there are no school kids playing here after class. Instead, youngsters from poor families come here looking for scrap metal. They burn the plastic covered cables from the discarded computers to salvage the metal inside. What is left is picked through by the younger children who are looking for any tiny pieces of metal which the older boys may have missed. Music The people behind the shipments have said that, well, we're trying to bridge the digital divide between Europe, America, and then the rest of Africa and Ghana, of course. But the reality is that these computers that are sent here simply do not work. There's no point in receiving electronic waste when you cannot deal with it, more so when you did not produce it, and your country is being used as the world's trash bin. The trash that for so long in the industrial age has been hidden from view is now coming into our lives and we can actually no longer easily avoid it. The waste economy is reaching its last legs because there's no physically have anywhere else to put the waste. I think in the course of time we've come to realize that the planet that we're living on cannot sustain that forever. There's a limit to natural resources and there's a limit to energy resources that we have. Posterity will never forgive us. Posterity will suddenly find out about the throwaway attitudes, the throwaway lifestyles of people in the advanced countries. People all over the world have started acting against planned obsolescence. Mike Ananay is fighting against it from the receiving end. He has started by collecting information. This is where I keep the e-waste that have asset tags or property tags. This says Amu Center, Northwest, Zeeland. It's from Denmark. This is from Germany. Sent here simply to be dumped. Westminster College. Apple. Apple should know better. It's a company that claims to be so green. There's a lot of Apple products that are being dumped here. I have a database that contains the asset tax, the contact addresses, telephone numbers of the companies that owned the electronic waste that have been dumped in Ghana. Mike Ananay plans to turn this information into evidence for a court case. We need to take some action, some punitive measure. We need to sue people so they stop dumping e-waste in Ghana. Markos is on the internet again looking for a way to extend the life of his printer. He has discovered a Russian website which offers a free software for printers with a counter chip. The programmer has even gone to the trouble of explaining his personal motivation. This happens due to bad construction. This is the business model. Not a good one for user and environment. So I looked and found... a way to make user-friendly software to allow active users resident input counter. Marcos doesn't know what to expect, but downloads the software anyway. From a small village in France, John Thackara fights plant obsolescence by helping people share business and design ideas. Ideas which come from all over the globe. In all poorer countries, things are repaired automatically. The notion you throw a product away just because it breaks for some reason is completely unknowable and unthinkable actually to somebody in the south. In India there's an actual word, Juga, to describe this tradition of being able to fix things. pretty much regardless of the complexity of it. We try to find people who are actively doing projects in the world rather than just talking about things or making abstract statements about how awful things are or what has to be changed. One of these people is Warner Phillips, descendant of the dynasty of light bulb manufacturers. I remember my grandfather taking me to one of the Phillips factories in Eindhoven to show me how light bulbs were mass manufactured in factories. It was very, very cool. Nearly a hundred years after the creation of the light bulb cartel, Warner Phillips follows family tradition with a different approach. He produces an LED bulb which lasts 25 years. It's not like there's a green world and there is a business world. I think business and sustainability go hand in hand. It's actually the best basis to build a business on. And the only really real way to do that, I believe, is to factor in the true cost of the resources that have been used. But you also look at the energy consumption. You also look at the indirect energy consumption of transportation. If we really made the transportor pay the real cost of transport, not to mention the fact that oil is a non-renewable resource and for which we do not really have a substitute, I would say that the cost of transport should be multiplied by 20 or 30. Factor all of that in into every product that you manufacture, then there will be huge incentives for manufacturers and entrepreneurs all over the planet to make products that last forever. Fighting against planned obsolescence can also be achieved by rethinking the engineering and production of consumer goods. A new concept called Cradle to Cradle claims that if factories worked like nature... Nature produces abundantly, but fallen blossoms, dead leaves and other discarded materials are not waste. They become nutrients for other organisms. A cycle. If you have a fabric like this, a sofa or a chair, the cut-off pieces are so poisonous that they have to be disposed of as special waste. Braungart found that hundreds of highly toxic dyes and chemicals were routinely used at the factory. For the production of the new fabrics, Braungart and his team reduced the use of the new fabric. Listed 36 substances all biodegradable You're so convinced. I let's put that in house. That's when she often content sister can't line schneiden and in muesli pack when she wanted In my name will get a shot at this yes, but slated for the convention will problem when it's about my next interest of this dinner stuff Every short-lived product is a chance to do something new. For the more radical critics of planned obsolescence, reforming production is not enough. They want us to rethink our entire economic system and our values. It's a real revolution. First of all, it's a cultural revolution, because it's a change of paradigm, a change of mentality. This revolution is called degrowth. Serge Latouche travels from conference to conference explaining how to get out of the growth society altogether. Decreasing is a provocative slogan that is meant to break with the slightly euphoric discourse of possible, infinite, sustainable growth and therefore to mark the need to change logic. The essence of the program In a way, degrowth means reducing. Reducing our ecological footprint, reducing our waste, our overproduction, our overconsumption. By reducing consumption, by reducing production, but by releasing free time, we can develop other forms of wealth that have the advantage of not getting tired when we consume them, such as friendship, knowledge. We increasingly rely on objects to give us a sense of self-esteem and identity. It's partly the consequence of the breakdown of things that used to give us identity, like membership of a community or relationship to the land or all sorts of soft and because we consume 26 times more than in Marx's time. But all the investigations show that people are not 20 times happier because happiness is always something subjective, of course. Critics of degrowth fear that it will destroy the modern economy and take us straight back to the Stone Age. that is to say a society whose ecological footprint does not exceed a planet, well, it is not to return to the Stone Age, it is to return, all things equal, for a country like France, to the 1960s. It's not really the Stone Age. The society of degrowth realizes Gandhi's vision, who said the world is big enough to satisfy everyone's needs, but it will always be too small to satisfy the greed of some. is installing the Russian freeware on his computer. The new software allows him to reset the counter chip inside his printer back to zero. The printer immediately unblocks.

It will be difficult to find the parts to repair it. Really, repairing it is not very easy. To repair it we are talking about 110, 120 euros. You have printers from 39 euros.

I would advise you to look for new printers. So, without a doubt, I would buy a new one. It's no coincidence that all three shopkeepers suggest buying a new printer. If he agrees, In a few years, Marcos will become yet another victim of planned obsolescence, the secret mechanism at the heart of our consumer society.

Our role in life seems to be just to consume things with credit, to borrow money to buy things we don't need. We live in a society dominated by an economy of growth, whose logic is not to grow to meet needs, but to grow to grow. So if the consumer does not purchase, you know, the economy is not going to grow.

Plan of Solicitors. The desire on the part of a consumer to own something a little newer, a little sooner than is necessary. This film will reveal how planned obsolescence has defined our lives ever since the 1920s, when manufacturers started shortening the lives of products to increase consumer demand. We will find out how designers and engineers were made to adopt new values and objectives.

Back to the drawing board. and come out with something that was more fragile. They time those things. They time them.

So when you finally paid for them, they're used up. A new generation of consumers has started challenging manufacturers. Is it possible to imagine a viable economy without planned obsolescence, without its impact on the environment? Posterity will never forgive us. Posterity will suddenly find out about the throwaway lifestyles of people in the advanced countries.

Welcome to Livermore, California, home of the longest burning light bulb in the world. My name is Lynn Owens and I am chairman of the Light Bulb Committee. It was in 1972 when we discovered that the lightbulb that was hanging in the fire station was a significant lightbulb.

The lightbulb at the Livermore Fire Station has been burning continuously since 1901. Ironically, the bulb has already outlasted two webcams. In 2001, when the Bowl was 100 years old, the people of Livermore threw a big birthday party, American style. I think we were hoping if we would get 200 people we'd be happy, and we ended up with eight or nine. hundred people showing up.

You think that anybody would sing happy birthday to a light bulb. Well, we didn't think they would but they did. Happy birthday dear Whitehall. Happy birthday to you.

The origin of the bulb was it was produced in a town called Shelby, Ohio, back around 1895, and put together by some very interesting ladies that I have some pictures of, and some gentlemen that invested in the company. The filament was invented by Adolphe Chalet. He invented his filament to last.

Why does his filament last? I don't know. It's a secret that he made and that died with him. Chalet's formula for a long-lasting filament is not the only mystery in the history of the light bulb. A much bigger secret is how the humble light bulb became the first victim of planned obsolescence.

Christmas 1924 was a very special day. In a back room in Geneva, some gentlemen met in striped suits to follow a secret plan. They founded the first cartel worldwide, which aimed to control the blueberry production of the entire country and to divide the cake called Weltmarkt.

This cartel is called Phobos. Phoebus included the main light bulb manufacturers in Europe and the United States, and even faraway colonies in Asia and Africa. ...firmly and normally......the conditions of great stability... Thomas Edison's first commercial bulb, on sale by 1881, lasted 1,500 hours. By 1924, when the Phoebus Cartel was founded, manufacturers proudly advertised lifespans of up to 2,500 hours and stressed the longevity of their bulbs.

So, at Fögus, we thought, we would simply limit the life span of these individual light bulbs to 1000 hours. In 1925, a committee was founded, the 1000 Hour Life Committee, which aims to limit the life span of the light bulbs to this burning time on a technical basis. More than 80 years later, Helmut Hüge, an historian from Berlin, uncovers proof of the committee's activities, hidden in the internal documents of the founding members of the cartel, such as Philips in Holland, Osram in Germany, and Compagnie des Loms in France.

Here we have a cartel document that says the average life of lamps for general lighting service must not be guaranteed, published, or offered for another value than 1,000. always. Under pressure from the cartel, member companies conducted experiments to create a more fragile bulb that would conform with the new 1000 hour rule. Phoebus enforced its rules through an elaborate bureaucracy.

Members were fined heavily if their monthly life reports were off the mark. Here we have a penalty table from the year 1929, which shows exactly how much Swiss franc penalty for 1,000 sold light bulbs the members of the cartel have to pay if the lamps last longer than, for example, 1,500 hours. As planned obsolescence took effect, lifespans fell steadily.

In just two years, they dropped from 2,500 hours to less than 1,500 hours. By the 1940s, the cartel had reached its goal. 1,000 hours had become the standard lifespan for bulbs. I can see how this was very tempting in 1932. I think at the time sustainability was actually substantially less of an issue because I don't think they looked at the planet as being one with finite amount of resources. They looked at it as from an abundance perspective.

Ironically the light bulb has always been a symbol for ideas and innovation and yet it's one of the early and best examples of planned obsolescence. The following decades, inventors filed dozens of patents for new light bulbs, including one lasting 100,000 hours. None of them reached the general market. Officially, the Föbus never existed, even if these traces of the public were never completely hidden. The strategy behind it is to rename itself over and over again at certain times.

Then it's called International Electricity Cartel, then some other name. It is crucial that this idea as an institution continues to exist. In Barcelona, Marcos hasn't followed the advice of the shopkeepers to replace his printer.

He's determined to repair it and has found somebody on the internet who has discovered what has actually happened to his printer. It's the dirty little secret of inkjet printers. I tried to print a document and it said parts inside your printer require replacement. So I decided to do a little servicing of my own.

Hello Marcos, I've got your message. Marcos has contacted the author of the video. I looked into it and it turns out that there's a thing in the bottom of the printer called a waste ink reservoir.

And the way inkjet printers work is they constantly have to clean the print heads and they do that by squirting ink through them down a hole in the bottom of the printer into this great... Big sponge. There's just a preset time when it's squirted a certain number of drops down there that then the printer decides it's full of ink and won't function anymore. The justification is they don't want to put ink all over your desk.

But I think the problem goes deeper than that. It's the way the technology works. It's just designed to fail. Planned obsolescence. emerged at the same time as mass production and the consumer society.

The whole issue with products being made to last less long is part of a whole pattern that began in the Industrial Revolution when the new machines were producing goods so much more cheaply, which was a great thing for consumers, but consumers couldn't keep up with the machines. There was so much production. As early as 1928, an influential advertising magazine warned that an article that refuses to wear out is a tragedy of business. In fact, mass production made many goods widely available.

Prices fell and many people started shopping for fun rather than meat. In 1929, the emerging consumer society came to a full stop when the Wall Street crash sent the US into a deep economic recession. Unemployment reached staggering proportions. By 1933, one fourth of our labor force was unemployed.

People no longer queued for goods, but for work and for food. From New York came a radical proposal on how to kickstart the economy again. Bernard London, a prominent real estate broker, suggested ending the depression by making planned obsolescence compulsory by law. It was the first time the concept was put into writing. Under Bernard Linden's proposal, all products would be given a lease of life with a set expiry date, after which they would be considered legally dead.

Consumers would turn them over to a government agency where they would be destroyed. He was trying to achieve a balance between capital and labor where there would always be a market for new goods. So there would always be a need for labor and there would always be a reward for capital.

Bernard London believed that with compulsory planned obsolescence, the wheels of industry would keep turning, people would keep consuming, and everyone would have a job. Giles Slade has come to New York to investigate the person behind the idea. He wants to find out if for Bernard London, planned obsolescence was purely about profits, or about helping the unemployed.

I have a picture of Bernard London. Dorothea Weitzner remembers meeting Bernard London in the 1930s during a family outing. Don't tell me which one he is.

Okay, okay. Let's see. Oh, isn't that interesting?

Yes, definitely. intellectual looking. And you met Bernard London in 1933. When I was about 16, 17, my dad and mother had this big Cadillac car, which was the size of a Zeppelin. Mother was driving.

She liked it. chauffeur dad was in the front and mr. mrs. London were in the back of the big limousine dad said that mr. London should explain his philosophy to me he's very interesting man and he just told me in a few words that was his idea to reduce the depression we were in an economic mess worse than today even was obsessed with this idea like an artist is utterly obsessed with his paintings you know he actually whispered to me in the car, afraid that his theory might be too radical. In fact, Bernard London's proposal was ignored, and obsolescence by legal obligation was never put into practice.

20 years later in the 1950s the idea resurfaced but with a crucial twist instead of forcing planned obsolescence on the consumers They were to be seduced by it. Planned obsolescence. The desire on the part of a consumer to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary. We certainly in America...

This is the voice of Brooks Stevens, the apostle of planned obsolescence in post-war America. This flamboyant industrial designer created everything from household appliances to cars and trains. always with planned obsolescence in mind.

In the spirit of the times, Brooks Stevens'designs conveyed speed and modernity. Even the house he lived in was unusual. This is the home that my father designed and that I grew up in. When it was being built out in the suburbs, everybody thought it was going to be the new Greyhound bus station because it did not look like a traditional home. One of the most important things that my father felt always in designing a product is that it made a statement.

He detested products that were bland and really did not create any desire within the consumer to inspire the purchase. Unlike the European approach of the past where they tried to make the very best product and make it last forever, meaning you bought such a fine suit of clothes that you were married in it and then buried in it and never a chance to renew it, the approach in America is the same. is one of making the American consumer unhappy with the product that he has enjoyed the use of for a period, have him pass it on to the secondhand market, and obtain the newest product with the newest possible look. Brooke Stevens traveled all over the U.S. to promote planned obsolescence in speech after speech. His approach became the gospel of the time.

Women and men alike are increasingly interested in the look of things. They eagerly give their attention to what's new and beautiful and advanced. Music Design and marketing seduced consumers into always craving the latest model.

My father never designed a product to intentionally fail or become obsolete for some functional reason in a short period of time. Planned obsolescence is absolutely at the consumer's discretion. No one is forcing the consumer to go into the store and purchase a product.

They go in under their own free will. That's their choice. Freedom and happiness through unlimited consumption.

The American way of life in the 1950s became the foundation for the consumer society as we know it today. There wouldn't be any products, there wouldn't be any industry, there wouldn't be any designers, architects, there wouldn't be any salespeople, cleaners, there wouldn't be any security guards, all the jobs would go. How often do you change your mobiles? Once a year. These days, planned obsolescence is an integral part of the curriculum at design and engineering schools.

Boris Knouf lectures on the concept of product-led design. life cycle, a modern euphemism for planned obsolescence. I went shopping for you.

I've got a couple of things. A pan, salt, shirt, another shirt. Students are taught how to design for a business world dominated by one single goal, frequent repeat purchase.

What I do, I pass these around and you tell me what you think, how long it takes for them to fail, what the service life will be. Okay. Designers have to understand what company they work for.

The company decides on a business model how often do we want to renew our products, our offers. So this brief is given to designers and designers have to understand and design the product in a certain way so it fits exactly the business strategy of the client they work for. Planned obsolescence is at the root of the substantial economic growth that the Western world has experienced since the 1950s. to increase consumption without limits. There are three fundamental instruments.

which are advertising, programmed obsolescence, and credit. Critics of the Growth Society point out that it's unsustainable in the long run because it's based on a flagrant contradiction. Those who believe that infinite growth is compatible with a finite planet are either crazy or economists. The drama is that we are all economists now. Why is it that a new product is created every three minutes somewhere in the world?

Is this necessary? I think a lot of people have realized that things need to change when they're being told by politicians to go shopping or to start consuming as the best way to restart the economy. We can say that with the growth society, we are embarking on a bolide that now obviously has no pilot, but that is going at full speed and we can predict the fate of either crashing against a wall or falling into a prison. precipice.

Looking at the service manuals of different printers, Marcos realizes that the lifespan of many printers is set by the engineers right from the start. I found this chip, an EEPROM, which is a chip that saves an inspection account. And when a certain account arrives, it's when the printer is locked and stops printing.

How do engineers feel about designing products to fail? The dilemma is captured in a British film from 1951 where a young chemist invents an everlasting thread. But not everyone is happy with his discovery and soon he finds himself on the run not only from the factory owners but also from the workers all fearing for their jobs.

Well that's really interesting and it reminds me of something that actually happened in the textile industry. In 1940, the chemical giant DuPont announced the arrival of a revolutionary synthetic fiber, nylon. Girls celebrated the new long-lasting... stockings but the joy was short-lived my father worked for DuPont before and after the war in the nylon division and he told me a story about how when nylon first came out and they were trying it out for use in stockings the men in his division were asked to take these stockings home for their wives and girlfriends to try out My father brought them home to my mother and she was delighted with the first products because they were so sturdy.

The DuPont chemists had every reason to be proud of their achievement as even men touted the strength of nine on stockings. The problem was they lasted too long. The women were very happy with the fact that they didn't get runners in them. Unfortunately, this meant that the companies producing the stockings were not going to sell very many.

DuPont gave new instructions to Nichols Fox's father and his colleagues. The man in his division was back to the drawing board to try to make the fibers weaker. And come out with something that was more fragile and would run so that the stockings wouldn't last as long. The same chemists who'd applied their skills to make durable nylons went with the spirit of the times and made them more fragile.

The everlasting thread disappeared from the factory floor, just like in the cinema. We need control of this discovery. Complete control.

If you want twice the amount in that contract, we will pay it. A quarter of a million. Just suppress it. Yes.

How did the chemists at DuPont feel about deliberately reducing the life of a product? Excuse me. It must have been frustrating for the engineers to have to use their skills to make an inferior product after they'd tried so hard to make a good product.

But in a way, I suppose, that's the outsider's view. Probably they just had a job to do. Make it strong, make it weak.

That was their job. Engineers were in a really complicated ethical time. This confrontation with planned obsolescence provoked them to examine their most basic ethical concepts. There was an old school of engineers who believed that they should make a pro...

usable product that would never break and there was a new school of engineers that were driven by the market who were clearly interested in making the most disposable product that they could and this debate resolved itself by these new school of engineers taking over planned obsolescence did not only affect engineers the frustration of ordinary consumers is echoed in Arthur Miller's classic play Death of a salesman. Just like Willy Lomax, all consumers could do was complain powerlessly. Once in my life, I'd like to own something outright before it's broken.

I'm always in a race with the junkyard. Just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. Refrigerator.

Consumes belts like a crazy maniac. They time the... those things.

They time them, so when you finally paid for them, they're used up. Little did consumers know that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, there was a whole economy without plants. land obsolescence the communist economy was not ruled by the free market but centrally planned by the state it was inefficient and plagued by chronic shortage resources in such a system planned obsolescence did not make any sense In former East Germany, the most efficient communist economy, official regulations stipulated that fridges and washing machines should work for 25 years. Here, this DDR refrigerator, I bought it in 1985. It is at least 24 years old and the light bulb is just as old, I have never changed it, so it is almost 25 years old.

In 1981, a lighting factory in East Berlin launched a long life bulb. The western buyers rejected the bulb. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

The factory was closed and the East German long-life bulb went out of production. Now, it can only be found in exhibitions and museums. Many years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, consumerism is as rampant in the East as it is in the West. But there is one difference. In the age of the Internet, consumers are ready to fight against planned obsolescence.

The first movie we made that really broke through was a movie about the iPod. I was completely broke when I had gotten this iPod. It was like 500 bucks, 400 bucks. And about 8 months later, 12 months later maybe, the battery died in it. And I called Apple to ask them to replace the battery.

And their policy at the time was to tell their customers to buy a new iPod. You might as well go get a new one. Apple doesn't offer a new battery for the iPod? No.

It wasn't that the battery died that was annoying, because in my Nokia cell phone, the battery dies, you buy a new battery. Even in my Apple laptop, when the battery would die, you replace the battery. But in the iPod, this expensive piece of hardware, when the battery died, you had to replace the entire unit. So it was my brother's idea to make a movie about, Without just that, we went around with a stencil spray painting on every iPod advertisement we saw in town. iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months.

We put the video on our own little site, iPodsdirtysecret.com. The first month, six weeks, it was at 5, 6 million views, and the site went absolutely bananas.. A lawyer in San Francisco, Elizabeth Pritzker, heard about the video and together with her associates, decided to sue Apple over the lifespan of the iPod battery. Half a century after the lightbulb case, planned obsolescence was in court again. When we brought this litigation, this was two years after the iPod was introduced, Apple had sold about three million iPods nationwide in the United States.

Many of the three million iPod owners were having battery problems and were willing to sue. One of them was Andrew Wesley. We selected from amongst the consumers who had called us individuals who would serve as representatives in a class action.

A class action is really a device that's fairly unique to the United States where a small group of people stands in the shoes of a large group to bring one claim before a court. My role in that... case was as class representative on behalf of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people.

The case came to be known as Wesley versus Apple. When my friends and family learned that this was a major case, they thought I was, you know, becoming a radical. You know, here I am, gonna sue, you know, I was the next Erin Brockovich.

In December 2003, Elizabeth Pritzker filed the case at the San Mateo County Court, just a few blocks from the Apple headquarters. We asked Apple for a number of technical documents regarding the battery life in the iPod, and we received a lot of technical data about the battery design, about the testing of the battery, and learned through that discovery that the type of the lithium battery that was contained within this iPod was designed, by design, to really only have a short period of life. I do think that Apple's development of the iPod was intended to be one of planned obsolescence. After a tense few months, both parties hammered out a settlement. Apple set up a replacement service for the batteries and extended the warranty to two years.

The claimants were offered compensation. One thing that really bothers me personally is that Apple really promotes itself as a young, hip, forward-thinking company. And for a company like that not to have a good environmental policy that allows consumers to return products for proper recycling and disposal is really counterintuitive and counter to the reality.

their message. Planned obsolescence produces a constant stream of waste which is shipped to third world countries such as Ghana in Africa. It's been between 8 and 9 years now when I noticed that loads and loads of containers were coming to this country with electronic waste.

We're talking about end-of-life computers, end-of-life television sets, which nobody wants in the developed countries. Shipping electronic waste to third world countries is forbidden by international law. But the merchants use a simple trick. They declare the waste as second-hand goods.

More than 80% of the electronic waste that arrives in Ghana is totally beyond repair and whole container loads are abandoned at dump sites all around the country. We are at a dump site here in Agbor Gloshi. In the past, we had this beautiful river called the Odo River, you know, that meandered its way through this area. It was teeming in the past.

It had so much fish. We actually attended a school not very far away from here. So we'd come play football and hang around the river. The fishermen would organise boat rides, I remember very well.

But now it's all finished, it's all gone. And that makes me really, really sad. And it makes me angry. These days there are no school kids playing here after class.

Instead, youngsters from poor families come here looking for scrap metal. They burn the plastic covered cables from the discarded computers to salvage the metal inside. What is left is picked through by the younger children who are looking for any tiny pieces of metal which the older boys may have missed.

Music The people behind the shipments have said that, well, we're trying to bridge the digital divide between Europe, America, and then the rest of Africa and Ghana, of course. But the reality is that these computers that are sent here simply do not work. There's no point in receiving electronic waste when you cannot deal with it, more so when you did not produce it, and your country is being used as the world's trash bin.

The trash that for so long in the industrial age has been hidden from view is now coming into our lives and we can actually no longer easily avoid it. The waste economy is reaching its last legs because there's no physically have anywhere else to put the waste. I think in the course of time we've come to realize that the planet that we're living on cannot sustain that forever. There's a limit to natural resources and there's a limit to energy resources that we have.

Posterity will never forgive us. Posterity will suddenly find out about the throwaway attitudes, the throwaway lifestyles of people in the advanced countries. People all over the world have started acting against planned obsolescence. Mike Ananay is fighting against it from the receiving end.

He has started by collecting information. This is where I keep the e-waste that have asset tags or property tags. This says Amu Center, Northwest, Zeeland.

It's from Denmark. This is from Germany. Sent here simply to be dumped. Westminster College. Apple.

Apple should know better. It's a company that claims to be so green. There's a lot of Apple products that are being dumped here.

I have a database that contains the asset tax, the contact addresses, telephone numbers of the companies that owned the electronic waste that have been dumped in Ghana. Mike Ananay plans to turn this information into evidence for a court case. We need to take some action, some punitive measure.

We need to sue people so they stop dumping e-waste in Ghana. Markos is on the internet again looking for a way to extend the life of his printer. He has discovered a Russian website which offers a free software for printers with a counter chip.

The programmer has even gone to the trouble of explaining his personal motivation. This happens due to bad construction. This is the business model.

Not a good one for user and environment. So I looked and found... a way to make user-friendly software to allow active users resident input counter.

Marcos doesn't know what to expect, but downloads the software anyway. From a small village in France, John Thackara fights plant obsolescence by helping people share business and design ideas. Ideas which come from all over the globe.

In all poorer countries, things are repaired automatically. The notion you throw a product away just because it breaks for some reason is completely unknowable and unthinkable actually to somebody in the south. In India there's an actual word, Juga, to describe this tradition of being able to fix things.

pretty much regardless of the complexity of it. We try to find people who are actively doing projects in the world rather than just talking about things or making abstract statements about how awful things are or what has to be changed. One of these people is Warner Phillips, descendant of the dynasty of light bulb manufacturers. I remember my grandfather taking me to one of the Phillips factories in Eindhoven to show me how light bulbs were mass manufactured in factories. It was very, very cool.

Nearly a hundred years after the creation of the light bulb cartel, Warner Phillips follows family tradition with a different approach. He produces an LED bulb which lasts 25 years. It's not like there's a green world and there is a business world. I think business and sustainability go hand in hand. It's actually the best basis to build a business on.

And the only really real way to do that, I believe, is to factor in the true cost of the resources that have been used. But you also look at the energy consumption. You also look at the indirect energy consumption of transportation.

If we really made the transportor pay the real cost of transport, not to mention the fact that oil is a non-renewable resource and for which we do not really have a substitute, I would say that the cost of transport should be multiplied by 20 or 30. Factor all of that in into every product that you manufacture, then there will be huge incentives for manufacturers and entrepreneurs all over the planet to make products that last forever. Fighting against planned obsolescence can also be achieved by rethinking the engineering and production of consumer goods. A new concept called Cradle to Cradle claims that if factories worked like nature... Nature produces abundantly, but fallen blossoms, dead leaves and other discarded materials are not waste. They become nutrients for other organisms.

A cycle. If you have a fabric like this, a sofa or a chair, the cut-off pieces are so poisonous that they have to be disposed of as special waste. Braungart found that hundreds of highly toxic dyes and chemicals were routinely used at the factory. For the production of the new fabrics, Braungart and his team reduced the use of the new fabric.

Listed 36 substances all biodegradable You're so convinced. I let's put that in house. That's when she often content sister can't line schneiden and in muesli pack when she wanted In my name will get a shot at this yes, but slated for the convention will problem when it's about my next interest of this dinner stuff Every short-lived product is a chance to do something new. For the more radical critics of planned obsolescence, reforming production is not enough.

They want us to rethink our entire economic system and our values. It's a real revolution. First of all, it's a cultural revolution, because it's a change of paradigm, a change of mentality. This revolution is called degrowth.

Serge Latouche travels from conference to conference explaining how to get out of the growth society altogether. Decreasing is a provocative slogan that is meant to break with the slightly euphoric discourse of possible, infinite, sustainable growth and therefore to mark the need to change logic. The essence of the program In a way, degrowth means reducing. Reducing our ecological footprint, reducing our waste, our overproduction, our overconsumption.

By reducing consumption, by reducing production, but by releasing free time, we can develop other forms of wealth that have the advantage of not getting tired when we consume them, such as friendship, knowledge. We increasingly rely on objects to give us a sense of self-esteem and identity. It's partly the consequence of the breakdown of things that used to give us identity, like membership of a community or relationship to the land or all sorts of soft and because we consume 26 times more than in Marx's time. But all the investigations show that people are not 20 times happier because happiness is always something subjective, of course.

Critics of degrowth fear that it will destroy the modern economy and take us straight back to the Stone Age. that is to say a society whose ecological footprint does not exceed a planet, well, it is not to return to the Stone Age, it is to return, all things equal, for a country like France, to the 1960s. It's not really the Stone Age.

The society of degrowth realizes Gandhi's vision, who said the world is big enough to satisfy everyone's needs, but it will always be too small to satisfy the greed of some. is installing the Russian freeware on his computer. The new software allows him to reset the counter chip inside his printer back to zero. The printer immediately unblocks.

Transcript for:Understanding Planned Obsolescence

Transcript for:
Understanding Planned Obsolescence