Giles Slade - Made to break: technology and obsolescence in America

Made to Break

America, I do not call your name without hope

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To scrutinize the trivial can be to discover the monumental. Almost any object can serve to unveil the mysteries of engineering and its relation to art, business, and all other aspects of our culture.

HENRY PETROSKI, THE PENCIL: A HISTORY (1989)

Cell phones and PCs travel in the company of a vast assortment of obsolete IT electronics, including last years Palms,Black- berries, Notebooks, printers, copiers, monitors, scanners, modems, hubs, docking ports, digital cameras, LCD projectors, Zip drives, speakers, keyboards, mice, GameBoys, Walkmen, CD players, VCRs, and DVD playersall awaiting disposal. PlayStations, Xboxes, and iPods are not far behind. Obsolete cathode ray tubes used in computer monitors will already be in the trash (superseded by LCDs, as in Japan) by the time a U.S. government mandate goes into effect in 2009 committing all of the country to High-Defini ion TV. The CRTs of analog televisions are constructed along the same general design as those of PC monitors, but they are largeroften much largerand are made up of about 55 percent toxic lead glass,while a monitor is only about 28 to 36 percent. But the looming problem is not just the oversized analog TV sitting in the family room, which will require a team of professional movers to haul away. The fact is that no one really knows how many smaller analog TVs still lurk in basements, attics, garages, and kitchens, not to mention the back rooms of sports bars, fi ness clubs, and other commercial sites.

What is known is frightening. Since the 1970s, TV sales have achieved about a 95 percent penetration rate in American homes, compared to the 50 percent penetration rate computers achieved in the 1990s. For more than a decade, about 20 to 25 million TVs have been sold annually in the United States,while only 20,000 are recycled each year. So as federal regulations mandating HDTV come into effect in 2009, an unknown but substantially larger number of analog TVs will join the hundreds of millions of computer monitors entering Americas overcrowded, pre-toxic waste stream. Just this one-time disposal of brown goods will, alone, more than double the hazardous waste problem in North America.3

The second stage of product obsolescence occurred about a decade later, in 1923. Executives who had migrated to General Motors from the chemical and dye-making giant DuPont adapted a marketing strategy from what was then Americas third largest and most rapidly growing industry: textiles and fashions. Instead of waiting for technological innovations that would push consumers to trade in their older-model cars, General Motors turned to sleek styling as a way of making newer cars more desirable and pulling potential buyers into the showroom. The success of GMs cosmetic changes to the 1923 Chevrolet indicated that consumers were willing to trade up for style, not just for technological improvements, long before their old cars wore out. This strategy was so successful that it spread quickly to many other American industries, such as watches and radios. The annual model change adopted by carmakers is an example of psychological, progressive, or dynamic obsolescence. All of these terms refer to the mechanism of changing product style as a way to manipulate consumers into repetitive buying.

The most recent stage in the history of product obsolescence began when producers recognized their ability to manipulate the failure rate of manufactured materials. After prolonged use, any product will fail because its materials become worn or stressed. This is normal. But during the Depression, manufacturers were forced to return to the practice of adulterationthe nineteenth-century technique of using inferior materials in manufactured goodsas a simple cost-cutting measure: inferior materials lowered unit costs. But these same manufacturers soon realized that adulteration also stimulated demand. After a decade of unprecedented afflu nce and consumption during the 1920s, consumer demand fell radically with the onset of the Depression, and in desperation manufacturers used inferior materials to deliberately shorten the life spans of products and force consumers to purchase replacements.