In my post “The nature of waste“, I made a direct link between the concepts of efficiency and waste, namely that:
Increasing efficiency increases waste.
That sounds strange doesn’t it? I had myself confused by this even though I wrote the post and came to what I felt was a solid logical conclusion. “How is this possible? Manufacturing processes strive all the time to eliminate waste, to use every ounce of material in the most efficient way possible. To not do so is like flushing money down the toilet.” Yes that is certainly true, but as companies increase efficiency in the name of competition in order to drive down costs, there is a hidden and lamentable side-effect. Driving down cost also drives down value. By that I mean that people generally perceive the value of something as a function of cost: the more something costs a person, the more the person values it. I am speaking of consumer goods here, but it is true of anything, summarized nicely by this common expression:
Nothing worth having is easy.
Contrariwise:
Anything easy is not worth having.
It is on the consumptive side of the equation that the problem becomes clear. By reducing a thing’s value, we regard it with less importance. And things regarded with little importance are broken and discarded with a minimum of fuss. “No problem, I’ll just throw this out and get another one.” In other words, we can clarify the assertion above by stating it this way:
Increasing manufacturing efficiency increases consumer waste.
Think about that. It’s not an obvious cause and effect, but it is real.
So, while we pat ourselves on the back for making things with a minimum of waste on the manufacturing side, we make up for that efficiency on the consumer side by sending tonne after tonne of otherwise perfectly good things to the dump for no better reason than that we don’t value them. And why not? Because they didn’t cost us dearly enough to procure.
Now think about how it was perhaps 100 years ago, when it was harder to produce things without the aid of modern machines. It took much more skill, labour, care, and time to make a product that would perform well. Given that it took such effort, prices were high, relatively speaking, and it cost a person more dearly to purchase it. It’s not a coincidence that in that time, people cared for their things. They maintained them. And if something broke they repaired it, or had it repaired by someone who could. Why? Because the thing cost them a small fortune and tossing it out and buying a new one simply wasn’t an option — at least not an intelligent one.
Right now we are living in an ever accelerating consumer driven world, led around by fashion and an endless lust for the ‘new’. This is enabled by the ‘efficient-izing’ of our manufacturing capabilities, and as we jack up the efficiency, we are most definitely jacking up the waste. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
As demonstrated by life 100 years ago, the equation works the other way as well:
reducing efficiency reduces waste
My point is that an equation implies balance. Or, an opportunity for balance, at any rate. And right now in our history we are far to the side of the equation that produces too much waste. Am I advocating going back to pioneer life, living in sod houses on the prairie? No, of course not. We all want the conveniences of modern life. But maybe, just maybe we’ve wandered a little bit too far to the side of avarice and irresponsibility.
What I am advocating is this: let’s reduce our efficiency a bit. Let’s let prices rise a bit. Let’s help people see that the things that they have right now are pretty freaking awesome and do have value and that there isn’t any real need to constantly cast around for new things. Don’t throw it out; fix it — get handy, get innovative. Care for it.
Now… it’s easy to say “let’s reduce our efficiency a bit”, but how in the world do you do it? I truly believe reducing efficiency will reduce waste, but in a competetive world where companies are keen to reduce costs in order to stay alive, how can you achieve that? I have only vague inklings of how at the moment, but it’s something worth working at now that I can put a finger on the culprit — or one of them — in our race to destroy the planet.
To wrap this up, here’s another bit of food for thought. Decreasing efficiency will also create jobs. I have worked in the IT industry for over 20 years, and one of the things I have come to realize is that while IT provides a lot of benefits to society, something that it also does really well — because of the efficiencies it produces — is eliminate jobs. IT is about nothing if it’s not about creating and improving efficiency, enabling one person (or zero!) to do the work of five, and making processes faster and less prone to error. Decrease efficiency and you will create jobs. It’s not exactly in the zeitgeist espoused by today’s politicos and capitalists, but it’s another way of achieving the same goal.