Year 8s explore the 'Story of Stuff' and one of the themes in that programme is how manufacturing shifted towards a model where customers were sold products which were designed to last just long enough that they would be prepared to buy a replacement without complaining that it hadn't lasted very long.This excellent piece in the Guardian starts with a quote from Nathan Proctor of the 'Right to Repair' campaign.
"Imagine you showed someone a smartphone 20 years ago. You said: ‘Here’s this thing, it’s going to be awesome, and it’ll cost $1,000. But the manufacturers are going to glue the battery in, and you’re supposed to get rid of it when the battery wears out.’ You would have thought that notion was completely bananas."
This sort of effort is now increasingly important, but will perhaps have stalled because of Coronavirus.
"Astonishingly, according to EU research, the average lifetime of desktop printers is a mere five hours and four minutes of actual printing time."
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