Technologically we can do more and more, but products do not last as long. That must change quickly, otherwise our raw materials will run out and we will turn the earth into a mountain of waste. Thomas Rau and Sabine Oberhuber write this in Material Matters. They propose a radical economic model in which we borrow rather than own products.
Incandescent bulbs lasted much longer in 1924 than they do today. At least 2500 hours, manufacturers proudly advertised at the time. Not long after, they realized that if everyone had such a great light bulb in their home, no one would buy any more bulbs. Then they would have made themselves redundant. To keep their business going, they came up with a solution. In secret, the world's leading light bulb manufacturers agreed that bulbs could only last a thousand more hours. This created a new revenue model:the product as a problem.
The documentary The Light Bulb Conspiracy shows how manufacturers since 1920 have been trying to shorten the built-in maximum lifespan of products in order to sell more of them in total. This excerpt summarizes this shocking turn of events.
We are now used to devices showing problems not long after purchase; this applies to printers, mobile telephones, coffee makers, but also to cars. They are designed to fail after a time specified by the manufacturer. They also have the annoying characteristic of not being hip anymore, because new versions of the same product often come on the market. In short, we live in a throw-away culture, which creates ridiculous mountains of waste and most raw materials are lost. That has to change, thought Thomas Rau.
The founder of RAU Architecten, an office specializing in sustainable design, decided in 2010 to no longer be responsible for products. When refurbishing his new office, he asked the commercial director of Philips for a light of 300 lux to burn for 2000 hours a year. He didn't care how Philips arranged this, because he only paid for the light as a service and not for the lamps as a product. Philips also had to pay the electricity bill. What turned out? Fewer lamps were needed and energy consumption fell by 44 percent. Light as a Service was born. This product-as-service concept encourages manufacturers to make items that last longer, are easy to repair and are also reusable.
The book by Thomas Rau and Sabine Oberhuber is based on the VPRO Tegenlicht broadcast from 2015:The end of possession. It appeared in the year that Rau delivered the first circular building in Europe that consists of 80 percent used materials and produces more energy than it consumes. Five years earlier, he and his wife founded Turntoo, what they say is the first company in the Netherlands based on the circular economy. Yet the architect is not the only one who strives for the full reuse of materials. He is someone who writes convincingly and comes up with original solutions for the circular economy. Particularly because he brings in many other fields, including art, philosophy, economics and law.
With regard to the latter:Rau would prefer to see which materials are made of each building. He calls it a materials passport. He also wants materials to be given rights and he therefore drew up a universal declaration of the rights of materials, which you can still contribute to, by analogy with the universal declaration of human rights. It all sounds utopian.
But perhaps it simply takes a Copernican turn – a radical reorientation of science – to realize this vision of the future. Yet Rau writes – in the last of the nine chapters – that we must get rid of scientism:the idea that the world can be made by man through natural science and technological solutions. After all, the flip side of this scientism is precisely the ecological crisis we now find ourselves in. That's where I dropped out. Because by using new technology in a good way, for example by selling lamps with a maximum lifespan, we can actually live more sustainably than we do now.