But her shelves are a fragile system. After a few years of books and a few trips in the moving van, she can expect a few bent hooks and broken rungs -- damage enough to render the whole thing useless. And then it's down to the curb with the busted shelves, and off to Ikea for some new ones.

Her shelves break, she buys some more -- just as Ikea planned it.

Planned obsolescence is a business strategy born of the same pressure driving globalization: the incessant need for new markets. By designing products with a finite lifespan specifically so the user will need a new version after a particular period of time, planned obsolescence ensures that somewhere down the line, your old customers become your new ones.

As business strategy, it's sound -- the manufacturer reduces the cost of crafting durability while simultaneously ensuring a future generation of customers. But as globalization expands Western business practices, issues of post-consumer pollution expand with them. More consumers, more trash -- every step towards globalization represents another million sets of broken shelves, piled in the garbage truck on their way to the landfill.

Space is finite, and the waste infrastructure is expensive. The profits made from planned obsolescence come at the costs of waste disposal -- costs planted directly on the consumer. But are these costs the consumer's responsibility?

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

An extreme example of a manufacturer abdicating the burden of waste is told in the fate of the Mir space station. In early 2001, after 15 years, 104 cosmonauts and 2.2 billion orbital miles, Mir was declared useless, and eighty tons of planned obsolescence was aimed at uninhabited parts of the Pacific from 137 miles up.

The cost of disposal to Russia's RKA space agency: the price of sending a Progress cargo ship to push Mir out of orbit.

The cost to everyone else: fifty tons of displaced ocean; whatever harm may come from a fungus-infested space station rotting on the bottom of the ocean; two nervous days of looking skyward by Easter Islanders and other inhabitants of the "uninhabited" Pacific splash-down region; some scared sheep in Dagestan where pieces of Mir reportedly fell; and the insertion into the atmosphere of thirty tons of metal gasified during re-entry.

Was it ethical for RKA to shift the disposal costs of their deliberately ephemeral product onto the shoulders of the environment (and the heads of those it may have landed on)? Alternate strategies -- blasting it into space, bringing it back down --probably would have cost more. But isn't safe, sound disposal a cost automatically assumed by RKA from the outset?

With consumer products, the cost of disposal is environmental and fiscal: growing landfills and an expanding waste infrastructure. More trash means more dumps, more garbage piled on the curb every Tuesday, more overtime for garbage men, higher taxes imposed on citizens to pay for them, more CO2 released into the atmosphere by their trucksÉ and while the individual cost may be amortized over time enough to appear insignificant and unrelated, the collective cost is enormous.

Physical trash, air pollution, chemical waste -- as by-products of manufacturing, they're all frowned upon and fervently regulated. Society has decided that fiscally profitable ends do not justify socially expensive means; consumer behavior does not validate the steps taken by manufactures to influence it. Given that planned obsolescence amplifies the problem of post-consumer pollution in a manner that mimics those of unfettered pre-consumer pollution, does the culpability for it lie in the same place?

PLANNED EVANESCENCE

The ethical corollary to planned obsolescence is planned evanescence. Coined by author and futurist Bruce Sterling as part of the Viridian Green design movement, planned evanescence extends planned obsolescence by demanding that, once obsolete, the product and all its physical traces should gracefully disintegrate and vanish entirely.

In a metaphysical sense, planned evanescence completes the lifecycle of a product. In an environmental sense, it returns the burden of product disposal to the manufacturer. And in a kindergarten-Golden-Rule-basics-of-personal-responsibility sense, it's what mom always told you to do: if you make a mess, you clean it up.

Planned obsolescence is smart business in a frantic market, and it's futile to demand its end. But by recognizing that the responsibility for trash created by planned obsolescence lies with the manufacturer, planned evanescence becomes the manufacturer's best interest -- it's ethical for them to assume the cost the waste, and logical for them to reduce those costs as much as possible.

I don't know how shelves can be made evanescent, or computer monitors, or space stations. I'm not a manufacturer; I'm just a person forced to deal with waste that isn't my responsibility. A future of sleek European shelves spilling from endless landfills is not a desirable one; nor is the thought of turning the South Pacific into a cosmic graveyard, or waiting for the sky to fall every time another spacecraft outlives its lifespan. And though decay is inevitable, trash is costly -- when decay is accelerated, trash must be considered.

Dave Prager . 1/03 (Parallax Journal of Ethics)

Back to my writing index.