Why Nothing Is Built to Last

Europe’s new right-to-repair rules promise to keep everyday products alive for longer. A century ago, the world’s largest light-bulb makers made longevity a controlled variable. The harder question is why disposability persists without a cartel.

On Friday, 31 July, a broken washing machine acquired something close to a legal claim on a second life.

New European Union rules began applying across products including washing machines, fridges, televisions, vacuum cleaners, smartphones and tablets. When repair is technically possible under existing EU requirements, manufacturers must now offer it within a reasonable time and at a reasonable price. They must publish information about their repair services, make covered spare parts available without pricing them so high that repair is deterred, and avoid unjustified hardware or software barriers that obstruct independent work. Choosing repair rather than replacement during the legal guarantee also extends that guarantee by at least another year.

The rules do not require every object to last indefinitely. They do something more modest and, in one sense, more radical. They make the manufacturer responsible for a product after the moment of sale.

That intervention has arrived because the ordinary market for durable goods produces an odd result. Buyers value longevity. Manufacturers advertise it. Nearly everyone dislikes throwing away a device because one component has failed. Yet the path from minor fault to complete replacement is often easier than the path to repair.

The waste is no longer incidental. The International Telecommunication Union estimates that the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, almost twice the total in 2010. Only 22.3 per cent was documented as formally collected and recycled. At current rates, the annual total is expected to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030.

It is tempting to explain this as a conspiracy. Companies make products fail, customers buy replacements, and the cycle begins again. There is a famous case in which manufacturers did exert extraordinary control over when a product died. It involved the simplest electrical object in the home and a group whose paperwork was more incriminating than any modern internet theory.

The true lesson of the light-bulb cartel, however, is not that every appliance contains a secret timer. It is that a market can praise durability while rewarding almost everything around it more reliably.

The hour chosen in Geneva

On 23 December 1924, representatives of the world’s leading lamp manufacturers gathered in Geneva. They included Germany’s Osram, Philips of the Netherlands, France’s Compagnie des Lampes and companies linked to General Electric, which participated through its overseas interests rather than as a direct member.

The organisation they created became known as the Phoebus cartel. Its formal language was reassuring. Members promised technical co-operation, consistent quality and more effective lighting for consumers. In practice, Phoebus also divided markets, imposed production quotas, shared patents and reduced competition among companies that were supposed to be rivals.

Then it turned the lifetime of a light bulb into an enforceable standard.

By early 1925, the cartel had adopted 1,000 hours as the normal life for a general household lamp. Member factories sent samples to a central laboratory in Switzerland. Bulbs were tested, results recorded and departures punished. A British parliamentary investigation published in 1951 found that, after 1929, Phoebus imposed fines when average life exceeded 1,500 hours. It also penalised lamps lasting less than 800 hours unless their maker had given an economic justification. Advertisements were not to mention “long life”.

This was not careless manufacturing. Producing a bulb that failed with reasonable consistency required control over the filament, voltage and current. Engineers who had spent decades extending lamp life were now employed to contain it.

Researcher Markus Krajewski later examined correspondence and test records in the Osram archives. The average life of the cartel’s standard reference bulbs fell from 1,800 hours in 1926 to 1,205 hours in 1933–34. By then, none of the factories in the data was producing a bulb that averaged more than 1,500 hours.

The evidence appears to offer a perfect origin story for planned obsolescence: powerful manufacturers discover that a product lasting too long is bad for repeat sales, then engineer progress into reverse.

There is one problem. A longer-lived incandescent bulb was not automatically a better bulb.

There was no perfect bulb

An incandescent lamp creates light by heating a filament. Run it hotter and it generally emits more light for each unit of electricity, but the filament deteriorates faster. Run it cooler and it can survive longer, while producing less useful light from the power it consumes. Lifetime, brightness and efficiency pull against one another.

This mattered far more when electricity was expensive and incandescent lamps were inefficient. A customer did not simply pay for the bulb. They paid to power it for every hour it remained in the socket. Extending its life could save replacement costs while increasing the much larger electricity bill.

The 1951 Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission therefore rejected the simple allegation that Phoebus had chosen 1,000 hours only to increase the number of lamps sold. Its report noted that the same standard had been used in Britain since 1921, before Phoebus existed, and that no single lifetime was optimal for every customer. For someone changing a lamp in an awkward railway signal, longevity might matter greatly. For a household paying high electricity prices, efficiency could matter more.

The Commission found no evidence that British consumers had been harmed by the lifetime standard. No UK manufacturer had been fined for exceeding it. Representatives of the British Standards Institution, the electricity industry and most manufacturers regarded 1,000 hours as the best available compromise.

That could have settled the matter. The next paragraph of the report made it interesting again.

Investigators had asked the manufacturers why they did not offer a longer-lived lamp and let the public decide. The answer, as the Commission recorded it, was that consumers could not judge the issue and that the choice should remain with manufacturers. The Commission called this attitude “rather arbitrary” and stressed the need for effective consumer representation when many of the experts setting the standard were joined by commercial agreements.

Phoebus’s deeper offence was not that 1,000 hours was an indefensible number. It was that companies with a shared financial interest made one compromise universal, suppressed a competing claim and limited the market’s ability to test alternatives.

The question was never simply how long a bulb could last. It was who got to choose what “good enough” meant.

The product that competes with its maker

Every durable product eventually becomes a competitor to the company that sold it.

A chair still in use is a chair that does not need replacing. A repaired phone postpones the next phone sale. A washing machine that survives for twenty years provides continuing value to its owner, but the manufacturer receives no extra revenue for years eleven to twenty unless it also supplies parts, maintenance or other services.

Economists call this the durable-goods problem. The producer is not competing only with rival companies. It is also competing with its own previous output and with the second-hand market created by it. In 1986, economist Jeremy Bulow showed how a manufacturer with sufficient market power could prefer products with inefficiently short lives, particularly when shorter durability generates future sales that the firm expects to capture.

This does not mean that poor quality is always profitable. Customers are willing to pay more for products they trust. Warranties impose costs on unreliable manufacturers. A rival can win business by offering something genuinely better. A company known for premature failures may discover that its customers replace the brand as well as the product.

The difficulty is that durability is unusually hard to buy.

Price, colour, storage capacity and headline performance can be compared before purchase. The cost of a replacement battery in six years cannot. Buyers rarely know how long software will remain supported, whether a common failure will affect a small replaceable part or an entire sealed assembly, or whether the necessary diagnostic tool will be available to an independent repairer. Reviews arrive within days or months. Many failures arrive after the reviewer has moved on.

The manufacturer sees the cost of stronger components, additional screws, spare-parts inventories, service manuals and longer support immediately. The buyer receives the benefit later. Society absorbs still more of the benefit through lower material use and less waste, but that value is barely visible in the transaction.

Competition can therefore reward features that are easy to display and costs that are easy to cut, while under-rewarding a lifespan that can be verified only by waiting. A thinner casing is visible in the shop. The difficulty of opening it appears years later.

A product does not have to be physically impossible to repair. It only has to become economically unreasonable to repair. If the part is unavailable, the labour costs more than a replacement, the software rejects a compatible component or the owner cannot manage a week without the device, an otherwise repairable object has reached the end of its useful life.

The replacement cycle can be shortened without anyone installing a hidden expiry date.

What Europe is actually changing

The EU’s new rules are best understood as an attempt to correct this mismatch. They do not order manufacturers to maximise product life. They try to make continued use a functioning option.

The distinction matters. The obligation applies only to products already covered by specific EU repairability requirements, and only to the extent those requirements make a repair possible. The current list includes household appliances, electronic displays, phones, tablets, servers, data-storage products and several other categories. It will expand as new product rules are added.

For covered goods, the law attacks the small frictions that can make repair theoretical rather than practical. A manufacturer cannot price necessary parts at a level intended to deter repair. It cannot refuse solely because an independent technician previously opened the product. Compatible, second-hand and legally compliant 3D-printed parts cannot simply be blocked. Indicative prices for common repairs must be available on a free website.

The extra year of guarantee after a repair changes the calculation in another way. Replacement used to be the safer remedy for a consumer who feared that the same product might fail again. The extension transfers more of that risk back to the seller.

There are limits already visible. “Reasonable price” will acquire meaning through enforcement, and a right to request repair is not a right to a cheap repair. The European platform intended to help consumers find and compare repairers is not expected to become operational until January 2028. Products outside the specified categories remain outside the obligation.

The rules also apply in the EU, not automatically in Great Britain. Britain has had narrower ecodesign requirements for selected household products since 2021, while Northern Ireland remains connected to EU product rules. The practical effect may still travel further. A manufacturer selling the same model across Europe may decide that one repairable design and one parts system are cheaper than maintaining a separate version for each market.

That spillover would be significant. Regulation often changes a product beyond the people directly protected by it.

The case for letting products die

Maximum lifespan would be a poor rule.

The incandescent bulb shows why. A lamp engineered to survive longer could consume more electricity for the same light. The same problem appears in other forms today. Keeping an old appliance in service avoids manufacturing a replacement, but a much newer model may use substantially less power or water. A phone built for effortless disassembly may need compromises in size, structural strength or resistance to water. Access to diagnostic software and components can raise legitimate questions about safety, security and intellectual property.

Durability also costs money. More robust materials, modular construction, inventories of spare parts and a repair network must be paid for somewhere. A cheap product with a shorter expected life may be the only accessible option for a buyer who cannot afford the more durable version, even if it costs more over time.

Nor is repair regulation guaranteed to reduce waste in every market. A 2022 economic model of right-to-repair policy found that manufacturers may respond to cheaper independent repair by changing new-product prices. Under some assumptions, they cut prices and sell more new units, increasing production and disposal even while each repair becomes easier. Models are not forecasts, but this one exposes a useful point: alter one incentive and the rest of the market adapts.

The strongest case for the EU rules is therefore not that repair is always environmentally or financially superior. It is that manufacturers should not be able to make the choice artificially difficult when a repair is otherwise sensible. The owner, who pays both the replacement cost and the inconvenience, should have a credible alternative.

Phoebus claimed to have found the correct balance between efficiency and life. Its critics saw a cartel protecting sales. Both accounts can contain part of the truth. There was a real technical trade-off, and the companies controlling it had an interest in one side of the result.

Modern products contain the same ambiguity at a larger scale. Glue can strengthen a device or frustrate repair. Software pairing can protect security or protect an aftermarket. A sealed component can improve reliability until the day one small part fails. Intent is often difficult to prove from design alone.

That is why the useful question is not whether every failure was planned. It is whether the market gives anyone enough reason to prevent it.

Where the analogy breaks

Phoebus was an agreement among competitors. Europe’s right-to-repair regime is a public rule imposed on competing manufacturers. One narrowed consumer choice; the other is designed to widen it.

An incandescent bulb also had a relatively clear failure point. Modern devices can become obsolete while their hardware still works. Software support ends, networks change, batteries weaken, compatible services disappear and users decide that new features are worth more than another repair. Useful life is now partly technical, partly economic and partly cultural.

Most importantly, the Phoebus evidence documents deliberate control of lamp lifetime. It does not prove that today’s manufacturers routinely design products to fail on schedule. Disposability can arise from ordinary incentives, fragmented repair markets, high labour costs and consumer preference without secret co-ordination.

The analogy identifies a pressure, not a culprit. Companies tend to invest most confidently in the qualities for which the market pays them. Europe’s experiment is an attempt to make continued use one of those qualities.

What to watch next

The phrase “built to last” makes durability sound like a property contained entirely inside an object. It is also a property of the system around it: the parts stocked, the information shared, the labour available, the software supported and the person who continues to earn when the product stays in use.

Phoebus tried to choose the useful hour on behalf of the buyer. Europe is trying to give some of that choice back. The result will depend less on how many products can technically be repaired than on whether repair becomes ordinary enough to be worth somebody’s time.