Manufacturing quality
In conversations about how we live in a wasteful society, someone will usually mention that nowadays, things are not built to last - stuff wears out quickly, creating unnecessary waste.
Save the planet by manufacturing higher-quality stuff, perhaps?
But is this really true? In which cases? To what extent?
Keep in mind that there's a tradeoff here: A higher-quality product takes more resources to make (specifically: energy, materials, and labor). This is reflected in the higher price. Also, keep in mind that some people tend to replace goods long before they're actually worn out. But in any case, there's probably some optimal level of manufacturing quality that would minimize resource usage in the long run. Maybe most of today's consumer goods are below that optimal quality level?
This is a page to gather some answers to these questions.
Case studies
This section has not been filled in yet.
Methodology ideas
We need to do some case studies using whatever data we can find. There are lots of ways we could analyze the data; here are a few possible ideas:
- Cost divided by lifespan: Pick some type of consumer good to analyze. Look at what's on the market (cheap models, expensive models) and maybe also what was on the market at some point (old models, especially ones that were really built to last). For each model, find some way to estimate the typical lifespan (either from specs given by the manufacturer, or from empirical data from consumer usage
(...)( might be hard to find; worst case, just use your own anecdotal experience of the product; better than no data at all, as long as you're transparent about how the data was obtained ) , or from both). For each model, divide its price (...)( corrected for inflation, in the case of old models ) by its lifespan, to get a sort of "cents per day" estimate. This is all based in the assumption that costs (or maybe wholesale prices) are a reasonably accurate reflection of the resources that went into a product. - Full life cycle analysis involving materials, labor, energy (or carbon emissions assuming the energy mix comes from mainly fossil fuels). [ELABORATION needed] This may be hard to find.
- Material physics: Consider how the thickness of a material would affect its deterioration rate under a given dynamic load. Apply this to whatever kind of product you want to analyze. This would give a sense of how much a product's lifespan could be improved by making it more "heavy duty".
- Find existing reports already published in science journals, analyzing tradeoffs of manufacturing quality. It may be hard to find publicly-available data, if most of it is kept as trade secrets. But it's worth a try.