I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that’s a step to the right direction. Still I’m left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it’s often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
Yeah, there we get into the part where logistics for a lot of spare parts are simply more expensive than for a finished product. You need more storage space, you need more workers for that storage space, you need to keep track of a large amount of inventory, and you cant fully standardize packaging since different parts have different needs when shipped. If you want to make a buck out of that extra work too, we have the situation that the sum of the parts costs less than the parts themselves.