I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that’s a step to the right direction. Still I’m left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it’s often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
It’s in large part a problem of scale. Manufacturers buy parts in quantities so large that their per part cost is relatively tiny. Doubly so for Chinese manufacturers, because of currency conversion. If you as an individual want to buy one or two parts for a repair, it’s not profitable for companies to sell you those small quantities unless they charge what is sometimes exponentially more.
Purpose-built automation increases the manufacturing capacity, making the scale even larger than it used to be. It also means the control circuitry can be made very compact and highly integrated. So there’s individual components failing are harder to identify and replace, and they can handle multiple functions so the device is notably more broken than and older device might have been when a component fails.