A stitch in time ...

Spare parts for appliances and cars are now unprofitable to keep in store for more than a few years because there are so many models, constantly changing. Even the same firm will produce several versions of the same model with hardly any useful differences, but it means there can be problems with repairability.

It is mostly not yet profitable for manufacturers to co-operate in making products similar enough to be able to be mended or have parts replaced with the same spares. We don’t have standard series of glass jars or bottles enabling re-use by different firms, rather than re-cycled into glass to make new containers. The old Milk Bottles Recovery Limited was a real “green” business. We don’t even have a standard range of window envelopes to enable envelopes to be re-used again and again. However, on the positive side, we have progressed from the time when even into the 1960s in UK, every power point in a house might require a different sort of plug, and today the same types of batteries can be used for most equipment requiring them.

“Conspicuous consumption” was how the rich leisure classes showed off, according to the sociologist Thorstein Veblen. In medieval times, there were laws to prevent the lower classes doing it. Today all classes may feel they have to consume conspicuously to be socially respectable. Yet we can enjoy our new purchases more when it is not something that we do everyday, and as well, we can enjoy the pleasures of the familiar things that are old.

We have a crisis of human energy.  People often say or feel “I wouldn’t have the patience” for many things that need to be done. Repairing is one of the things that take time and energy, although less than people think. “A stitch in time” or a button sewn on again saves money as well as preventing waste.

It should be possible to create jobs in “repairs industries”, in a society of users rather than consumers, as the cost of “new” increases. This would help to “save the planet”, by cutting pollution caused by production, by using less resources, growing less environmentally risky crops such as cotton, and by taking up less landfill. We now take great trouble to repair our selves, with advances in medical technology. There could be advances in the technologies of mending, and in repairing the earth as well.