The year was 1932. The Great Depression was in full bloom with increasing unemployment and a consumption that plummeted. Real estate agent Bernard London was deeply concerned. It was painful to watch people using their cars, clothes and other products until they broke down instead of constantly buying new as they used to before the Depression. Hopeless people.
In his manifesto “Ending the depression through planned obsolescence“, he therefore proposed to legislate against this nuisance. Each product would have a best-before-date when manufactured and by that date it would be returned or scrapped. People who continued to use their fully functional products would be punished. The term planned aging was created.
The eminent Phoebos cartel was even earlier. Already in 1925, a large number of lightening companies, including GE, Osram and Philips, resolutely divided the market between themselves and decided to limit the light bulb life to 1,000 hours instead of the 2,500 that they could last. Manufacturers who sold light bulbs with longer life spans were severely penalized.
Looking for a new economical system
That’s where we come from. No wonder we think that it’s perfectly normal for household appliances, clothing and electronics to have an absurdly short life span. We happily buy new stuff and thus keep the wheels rolling without complaining.
At the same time, we are talking about sustainability, climate neutrality, circularity and planetary boundaries. It is not even ninety years since Bernard London’s manifesto felt perfectly reasonable and even today we provide incentives to increase consumption. Shop, for heavens sake! And, after all, we haven’t exactly come up with a new economic system on which everyone can agree. But something doesn’t feel right and we all realize (well, almost everyone) that it’s not possible to continue doing what we do.
It’s all about survival
We’ve been talking about circularity with a number of customers this week. The question comes up more and more often as the excellence of linear business models is in question. It’s exciting to start digging into value chains and start exploring new, more sustainable ideas that also have a good potential to give positive results on the bottom line. There’s hope. And it’s all about survival, as Bernard London would have said, even if he proposed a different recipe from the one required today.
Important information: the girls in the picture have no relationship with goats.
Bonus
Now that you’ve read all the way here, we offer you a fine-tuned image that describes both the greenhouse effect and the carbon capture and storage technology (CCS):
