A less scrappy business

 

We have a Vauxhall Zafira which is now a few years old.  It ran perfectly until it failed its MOT as a small valve switch on the engine management system was acting up.  It didn’t actually stop the car from running but it meant that emissions could potentially breach ULEZ limits. 

The car is used for transporting lots of “junky” stuff for various projects and we would like to still have use of it.  Partly because of the expense of replacement, partly because we are quite fond the vehicle which has give us years of service, but mainly because the idea of replacing a whole car for the sake of a £50 component is simply horrible. 

But Vauxhall have stopped making the part.  All the spares companies have done likewise and we can’t find a breakers yard who will get one from a scrapped vehicle.  So it looks as if we will be forced into buying a new vehicle and scrapping the old.

This is, of course, what car manufacturers like us to do.

And it’s not only car manufacturers.  A component of our curtain rail (in a large bay window) broke.  It was a small plastic piece no more than a couple of centimetres long. You know where I am going with this: it’s no longer made and the equivalent component in the replacement system is incompatible (“improved” in sales-speak).  We could of course buy a whole new curtain rail, have it moulded to shape and installed at a cost running into hundreds of pounds. 

This does have a happy ending (I wish the first example could).  Our son had access to a 3D printer and we scanned the parts of the broken component in, tidied it up in FreeCAD, and printed a new one.  Works perfectly.  Cost: 3 hours of spare time (mainly learning how to use FreeCAD) and about £1 worth of plastic or less; installation time 10 minutes.  So if we can make replacements to order, why can’t the company?  At the very least, it could publish the template for such components so consumers could print them directly.  It won’t, of course, it wants the profits from forcing us to buy new.

I loathe, as you may gather, the throw-away society.  So it comes with some relief to read that IKEA has seen the light and plans to sell replacement parts such as chair legs and arm rests for its furniture, although those plans are at an early stage.  The company already buys back certain used items, such as its Billy bookcases, for resale or recycling if they cannot be sold, but this is a welcome extension of sustainability from the world’s largest furniture business.

As consumers we need to encourage all other businesses to ensure that their products are repairable and reusable for longer.  We need to look at retaining and repairing products rather than disposing of them.  Landfill sites are still full of mobile phones, upgraded every year by throwing away the old and buying the new.  The seas are full of micro-plastics much of which comes from plastic
clothing, worn for a season or two and discarded.  I could go on.  I confess that I have my own limits on ecology:  the car is too useful to give up, but manufacturer could do a lot more to help us (and the planet) and it is up to us to insist they do.  So, well done, IKEA.