This past summer, a friend told me that the $69 DVD player which he had purchased a little over a year prior had died. Naturally, this petit mort occurred about a month after its warranty had expired. I told him that he should get it fixed anyway, as the motor required to fix the loading tray couldn't cost more than $50 to install. That kind of thinking was absurd to him, as he could just pick up a new player for another $69, and that spending about $69 a year on DVD players was actually a pretty good idea. "It's like leasing a car," he admitted.
I tried to argue that there was more at stake than the cost of the player, as electronic components are not easily recycled on the consumer end of things. If Canada were to landfill, say, 200,000 DVD players every year, then we would quickly learn the value of keeping these things around for a while at an increased purchase cost rather than continually disposing cheap models. Then there's the fact that consumers are currently working too much as it is, and such product disposability would quite literally mean throwing away the labour required to earn the money to pay for the shitty product in the first place. Surely consumers would not put up with the illogical nature of an accelerating pace for product disintegration as our technological ability increases.
The first company to prove me wrong was Disney, which announced this summer that it would adopt the disposable DVD system of Flexplay, er, "Technologies". Flexplay thought it would be a good idea to produce DVDs that would self-destruct 48 hours after being exposed to air, thus rendering them effective pay-per-view options for all of us lazy bastards who find it hard to return films on time. Instead of bringing the film back, you toss the DVD in the garbage. Purchase price: $5 - $7 per film, roughly equal with high-end video rentals. Long term cost to the environment: rising logarithmically with trends in human stupidity. One of these trends would be the proposed introduction of these disposable DVDs into every fast food lid you ever purchase, from pop cans and cups to pizza and burger boxes. It should be noted that this trend was inaugurated by AOL's decade-long bombardment of our landfills with tens of millions of unsolicited CDs.
The recall of 175,000 Swiffer vacuums should further demonstrate to us the irrational redundancy of badly produced consumer items. There is simply no reason in contemporary technological terms that an item as benign as a vacuum could betray the owner in so widespread a manner. Companies like to make things as cheap as possible . And yet at the same time it is ungodly to think that we cannot simply make a vacuum and that would be the end of it. I mean by this that the vacuum you have would stick around for a while longer than Proctor & Gamble wants it to. But then in all honesty, no one purchasing a battery-powered vacuum would concern themselves with permanence.
The Swiffer rag came to prominence by confusing the public into thinking that things weren't clean unless you actually made more garbage than you had in the first place. Now you are expected to throw away your entire electrical cleaning system after a limited number of uses. Proctor & Gamble understands well that the foundation of the company's business is the production of garbage, and so they fetishize this act in their commercials. Nice ass you say, as the TV mom dances the dust into her garbage can, along with a Swiffer product. That paid actor sure looks happy now that her prop house is easily cleaned every day. In order to demonstrate the apparent ease with which you clean your house, the production of garbage is glorified by literally getting the cleaning supplies you used out of your life, kind of as though they were never there to begin with. I do hate to state the obvious here people, but those reusable rags that we all used to use before 2000 still work wonders.
We can indeed see these moves to complete disposability -- planned obsolescence, as those marketers like to say -- as demonstrating the end of consumer culture in a logical sense. I mean by this the fact that, in general, production comes pretty easy to us. The economic structures which provided so much personal, technological, and cultural development are currently operating in a field of hyper-production. Industrialism was the growth spurt which has allowed us to realize many benefits for individuals and society as a whole. Yet once grown, it should be time to put away childish things, or at least put them into their proper context. Now that we have demonstrated the capacity to provide for many, it is time to provide a degree of permanence to our possessions. Sustainability is adulthood in this context.
It is time for populations through government to stand up to the market whims of companies and force them to accept that which they have continued to regard as externalities: the cost of cleaning up the shit which they produce. This cost is deferred to future generations. Some US lawyers have even gone so far as to argue that this process amounts to taxation without representation, a position which would ultimately undermine the authority of the present government. We are, after all, in this together, and polluting the earth is to pollute ourselves. Do not kid yourself about involvement with environmentalism (to appropriate Lenin's comments on politics). We cannot allow companies to pollute the earth just because it interests them economically. This is a form of warfare, and perhaps the definitive Orwellian omnipresent-conflict that was heralded to consummate the 20th century. What we call economic logic in the present day is usually a euphemism for totalitarian greed and a tyranny for power which is antithetical to democracy. Ecology is democracy in its most primal and universal form.
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