What Everyone Can Learn About Their Gadgets From This Broken Toaster
The tale of an infrared toaster oven shows how we must fix our broken relationship with stuff
Anne Marie Green is a Right to Repair campaign associate for U.S. PIRG, an advocacy organization.
Peter Mui was elated about his new Panasonic infrared toaster oven. The toaster was futuristic; its infrared technology allowed it to bake food 40 times faster than normal. As an avid repairer and founder of Fixit Clinic, a network of free community repair workshops, Mui was initially pleased with the oven’s high-quality construction. But it didn’t last: The on/off switch stopped working after only three years.
The rise of unfixable products
Before the pandemic, a typical Fixit Clinic would set up shop in public places, like libraries, and welcome people to bring in their broken products: appliances, cellphones, laptops, jewelry, clothing, and everything in between. Together, guests tried to repair their products with an expert coach. Since the pandemic started, the events have been moved online.
As the founder of the Fixit Clinic network, Mui has spent hundreds of hours helping people fix their stuff. While the Fixit Clinic can fix 70% of items people bring in, coaches find that companies don’t make stuff like they used to. Instead, stuff is made to be cheap and nondurable, and it’s definitely not made to be repaired.
This brings us back to Mui’s faulty toaster. An experienced troubleshooter, Mui took it apart to get to the bottom of its issues. The problem he found was one low-quality part: the power switch. According to Mui, the one switch that probably cost the manufacturer pennies made his entire $130 toaster oven useless.
While Panasonic listed a replacement part for the switch, it was inconveniently soldered to the circuit board, a circuit board worth nearly half the toaster oven itself. Unwilling to purchase a whole new circuit board — which would include the same low-quality switch — Mui was able to solder on a non-Panasonic replacement switch after many hours of “fussing and cussing with surgical tweezers.”
Most consumers wouldn’t invest that kind of time, even if they had the same fixing experience that Mui does. If Mui’s estimations were correct, hundreds of Panasonic users likely tossed their seemingly top-notch toasters once they stopped working — all because of a teeny-tiny, 7-millimeter plastic part.
Stuff’s built to be cheap, not to last
Since the late 1990s, “durable goods” have been getting cheaper, but they’re not made to be so durable anymore.
Mui cites changes in manufacturing, namely contract manufacturing, as contributors to the early death of his infrared toaster oven. Many brands contract with factories to make their products then slap their logo on the outside when it’s finished. However, Mui doesn’t think it’s the factory’s fault that products are poorly made. He thinks it’s the brands’ fault for focusing too much on lower costs over quality or durability when awarding a contract.
Mui posits that a toaster brand can tell a factory, “Make me a fancy infrared toaster, but make it so that I can retail it at no more than $140.” At the same time, another brand can tell a manufacturer to make a toaster they could retail for the ridiculous price of $5 (which exists). In the end, expensive or not, both will break sooner than expected if durability isn’t a top concern. When stuff is mass-manufactured with little scrutiny to design or customization, it’s easy for poor-quality and poorly fitted parts to fall through the cracks, especially if those parts are small and simple components, such as on/off switches or thermal fuses.
Devices that heat up — hairdryers, kettles, and even blenders — use thermal fuses. These small but vital parts automatically shut off the device when it overheats. The problem is they’re often single-use; if a device overheats once, its thermal fuse breaks. In that case, one tiny part will break an entire tea kettle. Unless you bring it to a Fixit Clinic or otherwise try to repair it, a tea kettle with a broken fuse will become a useless hunk of plastic and metal.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As Mui explains, there’s a simple fix: Manufacture devices with resettable thermal fuses, or switches, that do the same job but can be used multiple times. With a resettable fuse, your kettle won’t be defunct after it overheats once. Using resettable fuses makes almost too much sense — until you realize they cost a tiny bit more to manufacture.
Unrepairabe devices or devices that are more expensive to repair than to replace are creating senseless waste: Electronics carry plastic, metal, and heavy metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium into landfills, potentially polluting water and soil. Realistically, most of our old toasters go to landfills or incinerators, and we pay the price for it in pollution.
There’s an inherent problem in how stuff is made — but we can fix it
If 54% of Americans say they want to buy environmentally friendly products, why don’t our products, expensive or cheap, seem to last? Why aren’t manufacturers listening?
We can have long-lasting and repairable products that protect our planet, but only if we make some changes. We, the public, need to wise up to the reality that cheap products can be environmentally costly, and we must push brands to do better. The more we fix our toasters, the more likely we are to see firsthand that skimping a few pennies on a switch can ruin an entire product. That’s the goal of our work: promote repair and sniff out stuff that’s junk by design.
This article was originally published at https://uspirg.org.
