“I choose my benefits, I don’t mind the worst”
One week ago I went to buy a new water pump for our washing machine, since my father (who has been a repair technician for almost 15 years) told me this was the problem. Actually there was some extra water remaining in the drum after every washing, and the cause was that the electromagnetic device failed under too much hot. That’s why I asked the shop assistant for the improvement of the new water pump I was ready to buy. But she simply answered me: “No, this is normal: in one or two years at the most, you’ll need to buy it again”. I was so astonished to know everybody assumes a company can deliberately build and sell gadgets with defective components without any problem. After this, I read an interview in “La Contra” of the “La Vanguardia” newspaper about the “obsolescence” of the devices: all the electronic machines we use and buy are deliberately programmed to die. He even quoted another example concerning one of these famous “iPad”’s, from “saint” Apple. The corporation was demanded by a group of people to include defective components in the iPad’s. Apple lost the judgment, but they preferred to pay the fine before avoiding this immoral practice.
We are now used to buy and throw everything: bricks, photo cameras, mobile phones, wrappers, cartridges, electronic components, clothes… However, this behavior has a hard impact in our planet: first of all, we get a really gigantic amount of rubbish, here and in the third world, where most of the big firms are producing because of the legal advantages. Secondly, we are severely harming our planet, since in order to buy cheaper and cheaper, we prefer to bring the gadgets from the furthest country, instead of producing it in our own country.
Here the interviewed showed another example: he is the inventor of one of the 10 kind of bulbs designed to light for over 70 years. They wanted to sell them under a normal price, in order to be widely distributed, but they received a number of multimillionaire offers to avoid it, and death threats from several lobbies in this sector. Actually, this bulb would save 92% of electricity and 20 billion € per year. We are now importing electricity from France, and are worried about the future: the experts speak about financing more nuclear centrals in order to be able to face the huge demand of electricity. But we human beings are so stupid. These bulbs would also reduce the 70% of the atmosphere CO2atmosphere, because they can run with very few degrees of temperature. But we human kind doesn’t want it: we are stupid and egocentric.
To conclude, some critical voices from big companies say that without programmed obsolescence we would ruin the market. But this is a big lie: it’s proved that nowadays, if we used good-quality components, machines could run for 40-70 years. Then, the market would be plenty of companies of repair services, second-hand firms… today sentenced to death. I don’t know how, but we should take part in this global change of mind.
