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In a world where we are constantly bombarded with advertisements and marketing ploys, QUT alumnus, Matthew Steen, has made it his mission to empower consumers to make mindful choices.
As the Director of Reviews and Testing at CHOICE – Australia’s go-to consumer advocacy group for evidence-based product reviews – Matthew is highly involved in product testing and content production. With a focus on mindful consumption, he is passionate about helping consumers make informed decisions that align with their values.
Matthew is a subject matter expert for the industry and consumers, and here delves into the true cost of cheap products.
Working at CHOICE has given me valuable insights into how manufacturers can be very adept at creating good consumer outcomes that may not be sustainable in the long run.
CHOICE enjoys a good consumer outcome, however the nuance of this has been tempered by a burgeoning need to think sustainably. For example, if I buy a very cheap product, it may perform perfectly well for a few years, and then may stop working. If I were to return that cheap product to a big box outlet, they would be unlikely to repair the product, instead opting to replace it for the consumer. A great consumer experience - but what happens to that faulty product?
Our sister organisation, ConsumerNZ, cheekily implanted GPS devices on a couple of low-priced and high-priced products to see if their end locations differed. The cheaper big box brands ended up in landfill, where they remained unrecycled, sitting in the soil, and leaching metals and plastic for an indeterminate number of years. The higher-priced product was refurbished, resulting in a longer lifespan, and sold back to the public at a lower price.
The difference between the two is that repair keeps a product out of the waste stream for a longer period of time. Instead of going to a dump, the carbon emitted by the manufacture of that product is mitigated over a longer period of time. If the product is kept out of the waste stream via any number of circular approaches such as reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture or repurpose, it delays the need to recycle or recover those plastics and metals or, worst case scenario, dump them.
The problems of cheap consumption compound when there is limited capacity to repair, reuse or refurbish a product, such as those that are battery powered. The proprietary nature of some battery packs means that once they are dead, they cannot be recharged, so they go straight into the waste stream. If the proprietary connections are updated, products become redundant when their batteries die, and they are no longer kept in stock. If the batteries are embedded within a product, there is simply no simple way for a consumer to get that product working again. While we have some local battery recycling starting to happen, what we really need is a way to extract those rare materials in every battery and reuse them as remade products within Australia.
Ultimately, keeping products out of the waste stream means changing the way some of us think about consumerism. The last 50 years have witnessed a period of boom for the rapid turnover of products by manufacturers (whether that be a new mobile phone each year or a new TV every few years). Keeping up with advertising to present new, New, NEW products in the market needs to change to present sustainability as one of the primary goals for selecting a product.
As mentioned in a recent article of ours on second hand items, the benefit of buying second hand or refurbished is being able to get more expensive brands for less money. It’s also one of the reasons CHOICE keeps all the discontinued items in our reviews, so people can check second hand items for their performance.
While CHOICE is all for a good consumer outcome, we’ve started incorporating insights which show the brands that last longer so consumers don’t need to worry about repair. Over time, we’ll also incorporate those which are easier to repair, and therefore cheaper to repair. This will lead to more consumers purchasing brands that last longer which, in turn, will lead to more products from long-lasting brands being available on the second-hand market. We’ve had several decades of mass consumerism, so making the change will take time – but it’s no reason not to start now.