Disposing with Disposability

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You talk in your book about how disposability made thriftiness -- such as saving rags in the early part of last century -- taboo. Are there modern examples of this?

I've written against the disposability of iPods and I thought people would say, 'Yeah, we're being cheated!' But a lot of bloggers and people on the internet write about how wonderful the disposability of the iPod is because you can get the next best thing really quickly. They seem to be missing the point. I mean, you pay $350 for a device, load all your songs onto it -- songs that cost you a dollar a piece -- surely, you want it to last longer than a year. Older people seem to agree with me, and younger people seem not to.

It seems like pretty much everything has a shorter shelf life today. You make note of Henry Ford and how he had a commitment to building durable products. Are there companies out there right now upholding this principle?

There are particular luxury products promoted as highly durable and therefore worth more money, like Mercedes-Benz and De Beers diamonds, but for the most part, it's hard to imagine a product that doesn't require repetitive consumption because the manufacturers are always shooting for more than one sale. They don't want you to buy one thing and never buy another. I guess Henry could allow people to do that because his market was constantly expanding. But as soon as he got a competitor, and as soon as his market stopped expanding, it didn't work anymore. We're at this moment where we're really challenged to find a new model for a market, and there aren't many businesses that do that right now. I guess Boeing aircraft, the manufacturer of jet turbines, and Caterpillar, the firm that manufactures heavy machinery -- they tend to recycle components and rebuild. They have a really good economic model that works for them.

Is it because of competition or lack thereof that they're able to do that? Or is there another motivation?

It might be that it's just the raw expense of their products. But, for sure, competition drives planned obsolescence. Competition drives the invention and development of new options that appeal to people and make them want to trade up. But it's gotten to a ridiculous extreme. I think in Japan most people replace their cell phones after eight months. It's stupid.

I'm trying to get mine to last longer than the 27 months the company said it would.

That's actually pretty long. There are some manufacturers like Ericsson that are building towards this trend. It takes a minute to take a cell phone apart in order to recycle it, and hundreds of millions of cell phones is a lot of minutes. Ericsson has a cell phone that's designed and in the beginning of the manufacturing pipeline. With an electronic impulse the phone falls apart at the end of its lifetime. It can then be machine sorted into recycling bins. That's good, but the trouble is that people aren't trained to recycle them; they just toss them into the garbage.

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