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?
Building a thing is very simple, generally speaking. There’s a stream of uniform parts that come into the factory, each exactly what’s needed, and they are put together in a precisely designed routine. It can be trained for quickly and done with minimal skill, by people who live in a low-wage country.
Repair, on the other hand, is very complicated. You need to deal with all the unknowns of figuring out what’s wrong, you need to find the replacement parts from scratch (if they’re even available), and the steps required to replace bits are made up as you go. You might need to desolder connections or remove rivets that were never meant to be removed. Lots more work.
Frankly, I’m not sure it should be encouraged in all cases. Prices really do reflect the value of things in a lot of cases; it may indeed be better to recycle an old broken item and buy a new one to replace it.