How can we stop buying so much stuff? “We can have a caring relationship with our things”

Connecting business research with policy, practice and public debate Connecting business research with policy, practice and public debate In an edited extract from an interview with the LSE iQ podcast,Julia Cohen (Corwin)describes her research on electronic waste and repair in India and explains how we can have a richer life if we reduce our dependence on new things. Julia was talking toSue Windebank. I was planning to focus on waste and electronic waste as a dangerous, hazardous waste product. But when I started doing research around Delhi I realised that most of this waste is being remade into new things. All of these fears about the hazards were there. But a lot of the waste was being remade. Old laptop batteries were used to make batteries for other things, like kid’s toys. Computers were remade into different computers and servers were remade into different servers. It’s an interesting way of looking at things. Its original use doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with its future use. And people get really creative. A lot of what I talk about in my book is the issue of “planned obsolescence” and how things are designed to be made into waste. And so, if you have an entire economy that is premised on the idea of not making new things, but making things out of used materials and continuing this cycle of reuse, you’re deferring waste. You’re preventing new things from being made. You’re reducing dependence on new things. And I think this is very significant environmental work that often is not recognised as environmental. A lot of the scrap guys that I talked to in India would not have framed their own work as environmental. But they understood the West as wasteful and understood themselves as not wasteful. They called America and the West a “use and throw” country. And understood that in comparison with that, they were really focusing on the value of things that did not have to be new. So, the circular economy is responding to the linear economy by bringing materials back into the system. And so a lot of economic or industrial theoretical perspectives think that it is great. It’s the new buzzword. Industry loves it because it makes them feel green. But I think it’s essentially a greenwashing concept, because you still have companies that are dependent on the production of commodities in order to exist. If they made the perfect product that worked forever, we would not buy any more of their things. And so, yes, it’s better to use some recycled things rather than using all new materials. But it’s still hugely energy intensive. Instead of the circular economy I would suggest that we move towards more of a reuse and repair economy, where we are not remaking new things, which is continuing this assumption that we need new commodities. We need to have a new phone. We need to have a new house. We need to have a new car. Everything needs to be modernised and updated constantly. Think instead about what it would mean to just repair them or reuse them. Unfortunately, I think this reuse-based circular economy is very difficult in our current economic framework. We have a sort of hypercharged commodity-based capitalism. And commodity capital depends on the constant purchasing of things. I think it would need to be a larger, structural change. I don’t like putting a lot of pressure on personal decisions because I don’t think that is a fair way to enact change. But I think there can be a loveliness to a repair perspective and a reuse perspective, where you begin to really respect the things that you use. This is the idea in my book that we can have a caring relationship with our things, that we don’t have to just assume because they’re inconvenient or not working that we just get rid of them. No. This is a huge problem. I spent time recently trying to repair a toaster. Probably getting a replacement toaster would’ve cost £10. Probably this toaster was £10. But I was like, “I am going to see if it can get repaired.” And I took it to this repair event where someone would help me repair it. And together we tried to open this stupid toaster. It took about a half an hour to open the toaster because it was not designed to be repaired. Then all it needed was a little bit of a toothbrushing of the magnet to get off the very encrusted breadcrumbs that I had on my toaster. And then it worked perfectly again. But the length of repair was entirely just opening it. A lot of design now in manufacturing is based on sealing things up, so that they then can’t be repaired or can’t be easily repaired. And when you open them, then they don’t close properly again. And that’s one of the main impediments to repairing a lot of electronic devices. I want to be moving wholeheartedly to more of a reuse and repair and maintenance society, where stuff becomes less important. Or the stuff that we have becomes important, but quantities of things become less important. And things can cycle through many different lives, which is exactly what I talk about in my book with electronics. And it’s very common in places like India, where electronics can have many, many different lives. Everything at some point is going to break down and become irreparable. Things cannot be recycled forever. At some point there is an actual end of life for most things. But if you can delay that and give it a lot of different lives with a lot of different people, you can actually have a very rich life with things while also passing them on to people and really reduce our dependence on buying new things. You can listen to the LSE iQ podcasthere, an interview with Fred Bassohereand an interview with Lilia Akaovahere. This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics. You are agreeing with our comment policy when you leave a comment. Julia Cohen (Corwin) is a critical human geographer and urban ethnographer whose research interests focus on the relationship between commodities, labour and the environment. She draws from political economic, STS, de/anti/post-colonial and political ecology approaches to study economies and cultures of waste and repair. Her research has focused on global flows of electronic ‘waste’ and their revaluation through economies of repair and re-manufacturing in Delhi, India, conducted through a patchwork ethnography of local markets and their role in global electronics trade networks. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.Learn how your comment data is processed.