Landfill Ahoy!
I was buying some jeans and a sweatshirt from UNIQLO earlier this week and, when I had completed my online order (the nearest actual UNIQLO shop is several hours away), a pop-up popped up. That is what pop-ups do. This one was a bit different, and I did actually click through to check it out. When I clicked on the aforementioned pop-up that had popped up, it linked through to information about looking after the clothes I had just bought and, potentially, having them repaired when they eventually began to show signs of wear.
This is all part of UNIQLO’s “Sustainability in Motion” initiative, which includes its RE.UNIQLO programme. As well as offering advice about caring for clothes, the company has ateliers where damaged garments can be repaired or remade, while unwanted UNIQLO clothing can be collected for reuse or recycling. Personally, I thought this was an excellent thing. Yes, there is an obvious commercial benefit to UNIQLO being seen to behave responsibly, but that doesn’t make the idea any less worthwhile. If it keeps clothing in use for longer and out of a hole in the ground, then I’m all for it. I certainly had this down as being much more than simple “greenwashing”.
As is my want, this sent me down a bit of an internet rabbit hole. I asked Google how much clothing is thrown away each year, and it came back with a figure of around 92 million tonnes of textile waste globally. That figure is also quoted by the United Nations Environment Programme, which says the amount of clothing being sent to landfill or incinerated is equivalent to a rubbish truck full every second. Whichever way you look at it, that is a shit-load of clothing to be discarding year after year.
A RUBBISH *TRUCK EVERY SECOND!!! Just try to imagine the scale of that!
* The size of the truck was not mentioned…
I don’t work in the rag trade, though I do wear clothes for fear of offending and getting nicked, and so my influence over the fashion industry is fairly limited. I can buy fewer things, look after them properly, have them repaired where possible and avoid treating a perfectly serviceable shirt as disposable just because somebody has decided that the cut and colour are no longer fashionable. Given that this train of thought started while I was ordering more clothes from UNIQLO, I’m clearly not about to start handing out gongs to myself for environmental excellence, but at least I can try to keep what I buy for as long as possible. Where I may, to a greater or lesser degree, have a bit more influence is in the home audio industry.
I asked Google much the same question about HiFi as I’d asked about clothes and was presented with an estimate suggesting that between 500,000 and one million tonnes of audio and consumer AV equipment enter landfill or informal waste streams each year. However, there doesn’t appear to be a proper global figure for HiFi because audio equipment is grouped with much broader categories of electronic waste. In other words, Google gave me a really precise-sounding answer to a question for which nobody appears to have collected sufficiently precise information. Anyway, they’re the only figures I have, and my Sunday morning rant will have to make do with them.
What we do know is that the wider problem is mahoosive. According to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor, the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, but only 22.3 per cent of it was documented as having been properly collected and recycled. The report identifies limited repair options, shorter product lifecycles and poor product design among the reasons the mountain continues to grow. We may not know exactly how many amplifiers, streamers and Bluetooth speakers are buried within all that, but I think we can pretty much assume that it is far too many.
At the cheaper end of the market, it is easy to understand how audio gear becomes disposable. If somebody pays £100 for a portable Bluetooth speaker and it stops working after a couple of years, the chances of them paying to have it repaired are slim to bugger all. If it fails under warranty, they might return it and receive a replacement, though I do wonder what happens to the broken one. If it fails outside the warranty period, it will probably be put in a cupboard for a while before eventually being taken to a recycling centre or, more likely, dropped into the bin without another thought to what happens to it thereafter.
That’s quite sad, but it is also fairly understandable and seems built into human behaviour. If investigating and repairing a fault costs almost as much as buying a new product, most people are going to buy the new product. Even if somebody wants to do the responsible thing, they may find that the product has been glued together, that replacement parts are unavailable or that nobody is prepared to work on it. Sometimes it is the battery that fails; sometimes it is a circuit; and sometimes a perfectly functional piece of hardware is essentially bricked because the software or online service on which it depends is no longer supported.
I’m always a bit wary of saying that manufacturers deliberately build obsolescence into everything they make. It’s an accusation that gets thrown about a fair bit and, in some cases, a short product life might just be the result of poor design, cost-cutting, or technology moving more quickly than anyone thought it would. However, there is no getting away from the fact that a business selling disposable products needs customers to keep replacing them. A company making something that lasts for thirty years has to find a different way of keeping itself in business. Longevity isn’t good for high-volume business.
HiFi should be a bit different, or at least I would hope it is. A lot of the equipment we write about at PiG is expensive, substantial, and intended to be owned for many years. There are amplifiers, loudspeakers and turntables made decades ago that are still being used every day. Some have been passed from one audiophile to another several times, and there is a healthy second-hand market that keeps older gear in circulation rather than allowing it to become waste. In that respect, proper HiFi is already quite sustainable. A good (passive) loudspeaker does not become obsolete because a new wireless protocol has appeared, and a well-made amplifier can often be brought back to life by somebody who knows what they are doing with a soldering iron. Case in point: I sent an 80s or 90s Krell amp back to the States to be brought up to current spec, and whilst it cost me a bob or two, I have a perfectly functioning amp that otherwise might have been dumped or sold as spares or repairs.
If you are spending five grand on a product that you use most days, then I would hope you develop a degree of respect and affection for it. When something goes wrong, the first instinct shouldn’t be to bin it and buy the latest model. It should be to have it repaired, serviced or, where it’s appropriate, upgraded. For that to happen, however, manufacturers and distributors need to make repairing a bit of kit a realistic and straightforward option.
I would like to see a minimum five-year return-to-base warranty offered on all proper HiFi products, over and above whatever statutory rights the customer already has. Five years does not strike me as being unreasonable for equipment sold on the basis of quality, engineering, and longevity. Indeed, it seems a bit weird to describe a product as being built without compromise and then guarantee it for only a year or two. If a manufacturer genuinely believes in what it has made, a meaningful warranty is one of the most obvious ways it can demonstrate that belief. But the warranty is only part of it, I think. Brands should commit to maintaining stocks of important components for a sensible period after a product has been discontinued. They should offer clearly explained repair and servicing arrangements, either at the factory or through authorised specialists. Customers should be able to find out where to send a faulty product, approximately what an inspection will cost and whether the repair is likely to be economically viable. If a product cannot be repaired, the manufacturer should be able to take it back and ensure that as much of it as possible is properly reused or recycled. Buy-back schemes, anyone?
This all becomes particularly important with streamers, wireless products and anything else that relies on software. A conventional amplifier might need capacitors, relays or switches replacing after years of use, as my Krell did, but a streamer can be rendered obsolete while every physical component inside it remains in perfect working nick. Long-term software support, replaceable streaming modules, and sensible upgrade paths should be treated as part of repairability. A product isn’t truly built to last if the casework will survive for fifty years, but the app required to operate it disappears after five.
Dealers have a part to play, too, I think. One of the traditional strengths of the specialist HiFi dealer was that the relationship did not end when the customer walked out of the shop with a box or had it delivered to their home. The dealer installed the product, helped the customer get to know it, and knew who to contact when something went wrong. That service is really valuable, and perhaps repair and maintenance should once again become a more visible part of what the industry offers. A dealer acting as the link between the customer, manufacturer and repair technician can make the difference between a product being saved and it being dumped.
We as consumers aren’t totally off the hook, either. We need to look after the things we buy, keep packaging where practical, avoid blocking ventilation, replace worn styluses before they damage records (I wonder how many tonnes of vinyl get dumped each year?) and resist the temptation to treat every new model as proof that the one we already own has somehow stopped working. If we no longer want something, we can sell it, trade it in or give it to somebody who will use it. The most environmentally responsible piece of HiFi is very often the one that has already been manufactured and is already sitting in our home. But then we all seem to suffer from incurable upgradeitis, and I’m as guilty as the next man on that front…and I obviously promote it, too!
What really struck me about the UNIQLO pop-up that popped up wasn’t that it offered some revolutionary technological answer to textile waste. But it reminded me that buying the clothes was the beginning of my responsibility for them rather than the end of UNIQLO’s. Why couldn’t HiFi companies do something similar? When a customer registers a product, send them a simple guide explaining how to look after it, how long the company expects to support it, what parts can be replaced and what to do if it develops a fault. Make servicing, repairability and long-term support part of the sales pitch, perhaps.
Perhaps we should even ask manufacturers about these things more often. Alongside the power output, distortion figures, DAC architecture and type of feet fitted to the case, how long will spares be available? Can the software module be replaced? Is the battery accessible and replaceable? Where will the product be repaired in ten years? These questions might not be quite as exciting as discussing soundstage depth or the splashiness of a cymbal, but they matter if we want HiFi to be taken seriously as an industry producing valuable objects rather than expensive future waste.
I’d written the vast majority of this article when Linette asked if I’d talked about the Digital Product Passport (DPP), which naturally I hadn’t, and so I did a bit of research and thought it well worth mentioning…thanks, Wifey. It’s a European initiative that is seemingly relevant to product longevity, repairability and waste, and is being introduced progressively by the European Union. DPP would basically give a product its own permanent digital record, accessed by scanning a QR code or something like that attached to the product, its packaging, or accompanying paperwork. Depending on the eventual rules for each product category, this passport could contain information about the materials used, how the product should be maintained, how easily it can be repaired, what replacement parts are available, and how it should eventually be dismantled or recycled. It could also provide repairers with diagnostic information, lists of compatible components, and proper disassembly instructions, rather than leaving them to fiddle around inside an unfamiliar box and hope somebody has uploaded a service manual to the interweb. This sounds like a brilliant initiative to me and one that might well make sense for HiFi. Personally, I think a properly implemented DPP could be an excellent thing for HiFi gear, particularly if it included the expected availability of spare parts, warranty and servicing bumph, the length of software support, and whether streaming or digital modules could be replaced when they became obsolete. It wouldn’t force a manufacturer to repair anything, and there is always the danger that it might become little more than another QR code leading to several pages of carefully worded marketing bollocks (similar to Art Bollocks, but more markety). However, if the information were truly meaningful and kept available for the expected lifespan of the product, it could turn the concept of “built to last” from a sales fluff claim into something a customer could actually check before handing over their hard-earned dosh.
Anyway, I’m not suggesting that my keeping a pair of jeans for another year will solve the fashion industry’s problems, and a repaired amplifier will barely register against 62 million tonnes of annual electronic waste. But large problems are made up of millions of individual decisions made by millions of individual folk: what manufacturers choose to design, what retailers choose to support, and what the rest of us as consumers decide to buy, keep, repair, or throw away.
Stu
