Planned Obsolescence: The Open Secret that Endangers Us

I walked into a stationery shop, bought a pen and asked for a couple of refills for the same pen. I was told that pen didn’t have refills. Instead, one could just buy another pen. After all, it cost only 20 rupees. The shopkeeper added that I was the only person who had ever asked for a refill for that particular pen. That got me thinking.

When and why did people stop replacing components and start discarding entire items? For some reason, the response to this question usually revolves around the comparative inexpensiveness of the replacement. Like the shopkeeper who told me, “Why bother with a refill when you can buy a new pen for 20 rupees?” A 20-rupee pen is hardly the first of its kind. Inexpensive pens usually sell for anywhere between 10 rupees to 50 rupees. The real news that businesses hope we’ll fail to focus on is that by not selling a refill which would cost 10 rupees, they’re forcing their customers to throw out a perfectly good pen and purchase another one when all we need is a refill.

Think about it and you’ll come up with half a dozen examples of consumer durables no longer lasting as long as they once did. Take my parents’ first Prestige pressure cooker as a married couple. They bought it in 1974. It worked just fine till 2022. That’s 48 years. Now compare that to one they bought two years ago. It’s already giving trouble. Am I to believe that Prestige has forgotten how to make a durable pressure cooker? Surely, there’s something else at play here.

THE PHOEBUS CARTEL

Prior to the year 1925, the average life expectancy of an incandescent light bulb was 2500 hours. That’s when corporations that controlled the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs in much of Europe and North America like General Electric, Tungsram, Associated Electrical Industries, Osram, and Philips had a light bulb moment! On January 15, 1925 in Geneva, they incorporated a group known as the Phoebus Cartel (Incidentally, Phoebus is the Greek God of Light).

The cartel set out to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours), while reducing operational costs and raising prices without fear of competition. This was one of the prime examples of planned obsolescence at the time.

A few engineers noted that bulbs with a shorter life can burn brighter for the same wattage. However, it doesn’t take a bright spark to decipher that the cartel's primary motivation was boosting profits by forcing customers to buy bulbs more often.

Like all cartels, the Phoebus Cartel wasn’t kind to those defying orders. They tested bulbs by all manufacturers and those whose bulbs lasted more than 1,000 hours were fined, discouraging anyone from providing customers with greater value.

The group had initially intended the cartel to last thirty years. However, with the outbreak of World War II, it ceased operations in 1939. Not that it mattered. Even post the formal dissolution of the Phoebus Cartel, light bulbs continued to be sold with 1,000-hour lifespans.

WHAT IS PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE?

Unfortunately, things were just getting started. This policy of planned obsolescence (also referred to as built-in obsolescence and premature obsolescence) has been adopted by most companies selling consumer electronics, clothing, utensils, etc.

At its core, planned obsolescence is the concept of designing a product with either an intentionally frail design or with an artificially limited utility. This results in the item becoming obsolete after a certain period of time by either ceasing to function, operating at a reduced standard or just being perceived as less desirable. What this strategy achieves is greater long-term sales for the company, by reducing the time between repeat purchases. 

This is no conspiracy theory. It’s all in the public domain and deemed legal.

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE IS ALL AROUND

An award-winning 2010 documentary, The Light Bulb Conspiracy, also known as Pyramids of Waste, delved into the idea of planned obsolescence of industrial products.

One of the case studies in the documentary is the Epson Stylus C42UX inkjet printer. The printer would issue a defect message after a certain number of printed pages and prevent further use of the printer. This lock, was said to be caused by a chip, which was added by the manufacturers specifically for this purpose.

But do we need to go that far? Surely, you remember a time when you could replace a cell phone battery when it packed up. You bought a replacement battery, popped open the back cover of the phone and replaced it. Nowadays, you have to buy a new phone. And this is supposed to be cutting edge technology? Phones may be getting smarter but the makers of phones are certainly counting on folks getting dumber.

TYPES OF PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

• FUNCTIONAL OBSOLESCENCE: Products using inferior-quality materials or designed to have a limited lifespan. Light bulbs designed to burn out after 1000 hours, irreplaceable batteries, and pens with no way to replace refills are examples of this.

  
  

• SYSTEMIC OBSOLESCENCE: Incompatibility with newer software or accessories that make older products unusable or less functional. I’m sure many of us have experienced software updates that make older devices slow or incompatible with newer apps.

  
  

• PERCEIVED OBSOLESCENCE: Marketing campaigns that make consumers believe that the product they own is outdated, even if it is in peak working condition and there isn’t much difference between the old product and the latest offering. Fashion influencers with their innumerable fashion haul videos are part of the problem, manipulating their unthinking followers into purchasing sub-standard toxic junk. The lines outside Apple stores every Autumn is just another example of this mass idiocy.

THE REAL COST

If you’ve reached this far, and still believe I’m overthinking this and/or that I’m particularly tight-fisted, let me be clearer. 20 rupees is the price of the pen, not the real cost.

The real cost is when a pen that you discarded lies in some garbage dump, not breaking down because it is made of plastic. At some point, it will get crushed under the weight of a discarded crate or some other trash, continue to break down further till it is smaller than 5 millimetres. This is when it will be known as a microplastic. Even smaller fragments of plastic are known as nanoplastics. They are smaller than a red blood cell.

These plastics then find their way into our food, water and the atmosphere, polluting the environment and endangering animal life. Human beings are impacted too. While the full impact of microplastics on human health is still being studied, here are a few effects that scientists have zeroed in on:

• inflammation 

• cancer

• lung and liver diseases

• deterioration of the gut microbiome

• altered lipid and hormonal metabolism

Other studies suggest that microplastics disrupt marine micro-organisms’ crucial role of sequestering carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. I can’t speak for you but to me, at first glance, this looks bad. And the view doesn’t get better at second and third glance.

So, the next time you buy a pen, buy a brand that sells refills too. I know I will, because we’re all paying with a lot more than just money.