Week 7 was an enjoyable week but also a very eye-opening week aswell as we realised how wasteful producers and consumers can be when it comes to responsible production and consumption. To me it became very clear that people in the developed world are much more greedy and expect much more than people do in the developing world.We throw products away to easily in the developing world.Its clear we have become a throw away society!We clearly don’t value all the products we buy because we simply have too many of them to give enough attention time to.The reason for all this is because of planned obsolescence which is adopted by almost every manufacturing company today!Manufacturing Companies today try make products that will eventually fail or become less desirable over time so that consumers will keep buying more and more products.A typical product that would adopt this approach would be any mobile phone.These days we can buy a new phone and by the next year that phone has been upgraded and so much more advanced that we think the phone that we bought is no longer any use to us because it has become so out of date so therefore we buy the new one and throw away the old one! Here are two contrasting pictures of how the Nokia mobile phones have become so advanced in the last few years.
Old Nokia phones
New advanced Nokia mobile phones
This planned obsolescence can also be seen in the selling of cars.For example in some cars these days it has become so dear to replace a broken part of the car that the consumer would be better off to update the car and buy a new more efficient one.However in stark contrast with this is the developing world where they do simply not have enough money to buy a new car so they try to repair it instead which is why we see a lot of old cars in the likes off Cuba and some other poor developing countries.
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Cubans put a lot of effort and ingenuity into maintaining old careds like this 1952 Ford Custom. With an average salary of $19 a month, most Cubans could not afford a new car even if they were available. Photo by Tina Gallagher.
But it isn’t all bad for example a clothing company named Patagonia are making clothes and other out door gear and they try to make their products cause least harm to the environment. They are an inspiration to many people who are keen on trying to reduce environmental damage to the world that we live in and i hope that they can continue to encourage other companies to try to be less harmful to the environment when producing their products. Here is an excellent video about Patagonia and what contribution they make to reducing the worlds environmental problems
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