How to Lower Waste

In an effort to lower consumer waste, the EU has recently passed a directive that consumers have a right to repair their own purchases: "The EU Right-to-Repair directive: What does it mean for companies and consumers?"

This is Odd...

This is a very odd idea for someone who grew up in a time when either you had money or you maintained and repaired it yourself before it broke.

For example, cars back when I was a kid has grease fittings (zerk fittings) that allowed the owner to lubricate the suspension parts on the car where today's cars have none and simply work until they wear out due to no lubrication.

Old refrigerators lasted so long they are a bit of a problem as seen on this Internet forum:

From d_green: "In his basement I found a vintage refrigerator from the 1940's that still operates and is still in use."

From BolderBoy: "My mother was complaining to me about a $40/month electric bill in an unoccupied house. She unplugged the 40 y/o refrig and the bill dropped to the nominal connection fee ($8/month)."

More on This...

Mr. Allen Swift: Born - 1908 - Died 2010 This man owned & drove the same car for 82 YEARS. Can you imagine even having the same car for 82 years? Mr. Allen Swift (Springfield, Massachusetts) received this 1928 Rolls-Royce Piccadilly-P1 Roadster from his father, brand new - as a graduation gift in 1928. He drove it up until his death ... At the age of 102! It has 1,070,000 miles on it, still runs like a Swiss watch, dead silent at any speed and is in perfect cosmetic condition. (Facebook post.)

Vacuum cleaners were designed to be pulled apart to be cleaned and lubricated or their electrical brushes easily replaced.

The original radios (tube radios) had fully consumer-replaceable tubes that could be replaced when they wore out.

Waste is very common in today's products.

It is only recently that consumer items created as much waste as they currently do by the feature of being 'lifetime lubricated' or some such nonsense which is simply 'designed to fail' in a number of months or years.

This creates waste.

A great example is the fact that 35% of the fuel that enters a modern engine is totally wasted and sent out as pollution -- to be controlled by added-on, efficiency-lowering, anti-pollution devices of course...

Which is where we come in.

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