Mirrored from Reddit, not my work. Source: https://teddit.net/r/InformedTankie/comments/hnc2cr/capitalism_is_unsustainable/
a study published in nature found that the world western level quality of life cannot be sustained at all. and not even developing nations can sustain there quality of life.
one word, Capitalism.
made to break:
its quite simple, a company runs on profits, capitalism runs on profits and if you do not keep coming back to buy there product there not making any money thus fail. this practice which is called planned obsolescence is very common, wasteful and exploitative.
The made to break motive started mainly in the 1930s with the pheobus cartel at a time when the average light bulb could last up to 25,000 hours! but then all companies were commanded to only allow a max of 1,000 hours of life to increase demand. this is a prime example of the wastefulness caused by capitalism. if this is not fixed this wasteful and disgusting trait of capitalism will worsen the lives of many as life grows more unsustainable. these are not just numbers, these are finite resources that with proper allocation and correct production could better the lives of everyone whilst keeping world sustainability.
Excerpt from TBS: “advertisements each and every day whose sole purpose is to convince us to keep on shopping under the promise that doing so will make our lives better. Through advertising, companies have managed to make us confuse our needs with our wants, thus making us desire to acquire things that we don’t truly need, so that we can fill in their pockets by emptying our own.” this quote will remain crucial to the following points and crucial to this whole post in general.
Not too long ago apple was fined for deliberately slowing older phones so people buy the new ones.
the resources used to make iphones are deemed critically low yet they have the audacity to break phones so people buy new ones? absolutely repulsive.
W: another example, inkjet printer manufacturers employ smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent them from being used after a certain threshold (number of pages, time, etc.), even though the cartridge may still contain usable ink or could be refilled (with ink toners, up to 50 percent of the toner cartridge is often still full). This constitutes “programmed obsolescence”, in that there is no random component contributing to the decline in function.
other examples/ways items are made to break:
Nylons: not nearly as quality as they use to be.
Consumer Electronics: the case of apple deliberately slowing older phones and as shown below the tricks like placing the most sensitive part next to the hottest part on the circuit.
Cars: Vehicles that mere made before world war 2 were still being driven in the 60s. but this is not profitable, so companies created plans.
taken from RTP:
- “routinely discontinue parts that could otherwise be made available for repairs.”
- ” confirm to a strict yearly cycle of model releases, often introducing purely cosmetic changes from one year to the next.”
- “retire popular models and bring out something new every few years, making it harder to fix older vehicles.” (instead of “sticking with hits and standardizing them over time, which would better support a repair aftermarket”)
Cars today, for many, are seen as a fashion accessory and statement. It has become common for people to buy the new model of a car, even if the one they own is in great shape, and still has years to live.
Unavailable/high cost spare parts: underproduction of a spare part leads to no availability of said part. but they will offer this *new* part that costs much more than the old part but its now the only choice you got.
Vulnerability to wear and tear: examples are the fact some electronics most sensitive parts are exposed to the hottest part on the circuit. but it is not limited to the previous example.
Warranty: many do not bother to keep a receipt, it gets lost, etc. but its not limited to that, especially if the repair can take months. also cases of having to send it to the manufacturer with out-of-pocket expenses.
these are just a few examples of ‘made to break’ or planned obsolescence. this is widespread, considering the fact this system relies on profit and demand.
Overproduction and waste:
relevant comment by u/jbid25
Taken from TWC:
Most things as i’ve shown are made to break but general wastefulness and environmentally safe procedures are not widespread.
use it and lose it is the western philosophy. We way overproduce, and discard just about everything we use instantly. we dont care what items they are whether it be tossing our old tv in the trash to getting groceries with plastic bags. we waste a lot, some has to do with the fact things are not made to last but it also has to do with the fact capitalism is ecologically inefficient in production.
taken from TG:
“A record 54m tonnes of “e-waste” was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21% in five years, the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor report found. The 2019 figure is equivalent to 7.3kg for every man, woman and child on Earth, though use is concentrated in richer nations. The amount of e-waste is rising three times faster than the world’s population, and only 17% of it was recycled in 2019.” this is unsustainable, almost nothing is being done about it. These are precious resources in a finite planet these are not just numbers. we need a more efficient system that systematically deals with waste and we need to systematically deal with how we dispose of things. decades and capitalism has not fixed it. this all gets back to the original study, the world cannot sustain its living standards BECAUSE OF CAPITALISM. capitalisms inabilities to deal with these billions of tonnes of precious finite resources being wasted and dumped. but the study only dealt with current statistics, the thing is we can create a more efficient economy, a planned economy with proper technology, organization and planning so we can give everyone a decent standard of living on a finite planet.
its simple. its not profitable to allocate resources for ‘free’ so there dumped.
a staggering 2.9 trillion pounds is wasted every year, this is enough to feed the entire world.
taken from here:
The amount of trash generated by the UK could fill Britain’s largest lake, Lake Windermere, in just 8 months.
We used to get through 500 million plastic bags every week in the UK – amounting to billions of bags and thousands of tonnes of plastic. Sadly, each bag will take between 500 and 1,000 years to decompose in landfil
At Christmas, as much as 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper will end up in UK bins when it could have been recycled instead. That’s the same size as Sunderland!
The number of disposable nappies each baby gets through weighs the same as a family car
Humans now buy a million plastic bottles a minute. Most of this plastic ends up in the ocean. By 2050, the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish.
It’s not just what goes in the bin that counts as waste – water can be wasted, too. A single leaky tap in your house can waste as much as 5,000 litres of water a year. If we all fixed our dripping taps we could supply 120,000 people with a day’s worth of water.
Nine-tenths of all solid waste in the United States does not get recycled.
Landfills are among the biggest contributors to soil pollution – roughly 80% of the items buried in landfills could be recycled.
Although 75% of America’s waste is recyclable, we only recycle around 30% of it.
A single recycled plastic bottle saves enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 4 hours. It also creates 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than would be created when making a new bottle.
Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as it takes to burn it.
It only takes 5 recycled plastic bottles to make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.
Motor oil never wears out, it just gets dirty – and it can be recycled.
Over 11 million tons of recyclable clothing, shoes, and textiles make their way into landfills each year.
Glass bottles take 4,000 years to decompose.
Glass, like aluminum, is infinitely recyclable – without any loss in purity or quality.
the above list is very small and only highlights a few things but i hope this gives everyone an idea of what is going on.
The United States throws out the amount of office paper it would take to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City (2,794 miles).
Continued:
Competition will not fix waste
lets assume there is a super competitive market, lets say fast food. profit for most companies is being lowered so taking ecological precautions will be costly thus not profitable, especially for an already struggling business. monopolies have a better chance at dealing with ecological issues.
lets use switzerland the most competitive nation on earth. it had a pretty bad recycling and management waste rate. it wasnt till regulation that waste management doubled in efficiency. waste management and recycling pretty much failed in the most competitive nation on earth until government intervention.
Problem and Solution:
Problem
The obvious problem is capitalism. the made to break trait leading to mass waste, just think of the light bulb example, the electronics example and the car example. companies deliberately made cars to fail in much shorter times. the inefficiencies in production, the destruction of resources to raise prices and simply the lack of care from capitalists to deal with any of the problems significantly.
some steps have been taken but many have been reversed, and the rate at which these problems increase spells inevitable doom.
most of these resources are completely reusable, recyclable or can be extracted for energy and other resources.
Solution
A planned economy with intensive recycling and reuse policies. the USSR had decent policies concerning the environment like turning in any scrap paper, no plastic bags, massive reforestation initiatives, etc. but it needs to be taken much further and a planned economy has a much better chance at systematically dealing with such problems vs a market economy that legislators and companies are fighting eachother over simple plastic regulation.
we need an economy where things are built to last. cars that can be passed on for generations, devices that last 100+ years (but still upgradeable), food that is not over produced and if wasted systematically turned into energy, etc. this is the type of economy needed for us to simply survive. this will not happen in a market economy, profit is required.
im not done yet, i want to get into specific policy.