Encouraging waste

I’m trying to renovate my bathroom at the moment, it’s looking and feeling a bit run down. I don’t want to replace everything, just those parts that are beyond repair, so that I’m not needlessly adding to landfill. Who’d have thought it would be so hard on my wallet and my time?I’d like to use my cheap contract bathroom taps, the builder’s originals, as an example.

The handles are plastic and after about 20 years the splines that connect them to the tap bodies have started to break up.

I thought I’ll replace them with something a little nicer, chromed metal ones should do. I looked around locally and found just what I was looking for… but you couldn’t buy them without replacement tap bodies as well, in fact you could buy any handles on their own. The Internet supplied the answer in the form of prompt service from Not Just Taps.com.

I suspected that the cold bath tap washer was started to fail last night. Replacing the washer is an easy job I’ve done many times and for which I carry spares, this should only take 5 minutes tomorrow I thought.

Unfortunately once dissembled, it became obvious that the tap body was also shot: I don’t have spares for that, and it took a long walk around town on Sunday to yield a suitable, though not exact, replacement part. Definitely not a 5 minute job!

The point of this post is that in both of these situations finding parts locally was really hard, and frequently a straight replacement was unavailable. But what really struck me was that the cost of the parts was often many times that of a complete new tap!

A mass manufacturer can benefit from economies of scale when producing their product, but are our spares too expensive or the taps too cheap? If the latter is true, doesn’t it encourage waste: throwing away useful products because they’re not worth fixing?

I’ve been talking about my bathroom, but this situation will be familiar to anyone who’s tried to get any consumer product fixed. But it can’t be right… can it?