This video documents how manufacturers shift from the making quality products that were designed to have a long service life to deliberately shortening life of products to drive consumption and economy. Product engineers were made to adopt different values and objectives in their designs while consumers had to accept this newfound disposability as a norm. In a modern context, new products are made available to consumers at a rapid rate, enabling consumers to retire and replace their products unnecessarily.

The documentary also explored one of the potential environmental and social impacts of careless electronic consumption. As computers and electronic devices are disposed, a significant portion of the waste is shipped off to developing regions such as Africa. The electronic waste contains toxic components such as lead and cadmium and they are liberated when locals try to obtain scrap metals using primitive methods. Therefore causing health problems and polluting the environment surrounding the electronic waste dump.

While the manufacturers have created the consumer’s society as we know now, there is an increasing awareness of the finiteness of earth’s resources and the need for sustainable development. Some people are taking a step towards improving the sustainability of the consumer’s society. From consumers working to help other consumers bypass predetermined time for failure in an electronic device, to filing lawsuits against corporations that have unsustainable policies, to manufacturers taking a different approach to production design.

Perhaps we could all then take a moment before retiring our phone for the spanking new one that we have been coveting.

“It’s not like there is a green world and a business world, I think business and sustainability go hand in hand is actually the best basis to build a business on. And the only real way to do that is to factor in the true cost of the resources that have been used and also look at the energy consumption and also the indirect energy consumption of transportation. If you factor all that in to all the product that you manufacture, then there will be huge incentives for manufacturers to entrepreneurs all over the planet to make products that last forever” – Warner Philips (Lemnis Lighting)