Sustainability Through Longer Life Products

Companies and every citizen in the world are being challenged to live better with less as Global society goes through a major transition towards more sustainable economies. One opportunity for businesses is to maybe return to designing and producing products with a longer natural operating life.

Planned obsolescence maybe good for the short term bottom line but is rubbish under any sensible sustainability measure even if the manufacturers are involved with their supply chain in a closed loop manufacturing program. The gate costs alone of collecting, recycling and reprocessing components of redundant products may be uneconomic against the cost of designing and making products that operate longer or that can be fixed easily by the owner or the friendly local repair service.

There is also something perverse in the strategy of making a short life product to pile high and sell cheap just because it can all be recycled at someone other than the manufacturers expense. At the recently held Recycling & Waste Management event at the NEC, Birmingham in the UK last week there was plenty of very clever and expensive kit for sale that will be used to clean, sort and package these waste streams all using vast quantities of water, energy and space. Of course landfill and other disposable taxes are being used to reclaim this cost from the supply chain but it is the consumer who ultimately has to pay for this one way or the other.

This may well mean that companies will employ fewer people but the knock on benefits should ensure that they are all employed for longer too, have genuine pride in their work and integrity in that they are working for a company with products that will do the least harm over the products total life! With some clever tweaks to the income model beyond the pure wholesale trading of products there are also opportunities for the manufacturing companies business managers to add value to their bottom lines too.