Nick Palmer wrote: Orionworks uses the manufacture of APWs (all purpose widgets) to analyse > work and reward. Imagine if the APW's are made to last a long time, to be > easily repairable and, at the end of their very long life, the materials > they are made from can be easily recycled to make new APWs. Now imagine that > this durability/longevity is so extreme that the APWs last long enough that > they could be bequeathed to your children...
With some slow changing technology or big-ticket items that is not a bad idea, but for most devices I do not think longevity should go beyond ~20 years. Reasons: Longevity comes at a price. It takes more materials and more maintenance to keep equipment around. The equipment costs more. At a certain point it is cheaper and it takes fewer resources to replace something. It is difficult to make like a small electric motors used in a fan or airconditioner safe and effective for 20 years. A gas fired oven or space heater will corrode even with the best materials, and it will become unsafe. Engineering them to last longer may require changing out parts in ways that if done wrong can be dangerous. As long as the materials can be recycled and *are* recycled, material extraction (mining, cutting trees and so on) is the same either way. Nearly every kilogram of a modern automobile is recycled. Many technologies are still improving rapidly. Devices older than 20 years are often obsolete. They are often inefficient, polluting or dangerous compared to the up-to-date version. This is true of technology that you would not think has much room to improve, such as wood-burning stoves. It is especially true of automobiles. A modern car is far safer and more efficient than models built 20 years ago, and cheaper when you take into account the overall cost of accidents as reflected in the cost of insurance. Refrigerators, gas space heaters and heat pumps are improving by leaps and bounds. The energy savings from replacing a 20 year old refrigerator easily pays for the cost of the new equipment. There is no point to making computers and other electronic gadgets last 20 years. The technology is still changing so rapidly that a 20-year-old computer will be a useless doorstop. They should be made more easy to recycle, and they are. Things which should be long lasting include -- Big ticket items that should be designed to last 50 to 100 years include things like dams, wind turbine towers, bridges, some types of ships, and so on. Houses, large buildings of some types, but perhaps not hospitals, which tend to be obsolete the day they go into service. I have to say, though, only an aficionado like me would want to live in a 100-year-old Japanese farmhouse. A couple of months ago I saw a TV special in Japanese which resembled "The 1900 House" in which they got a bunch of 10 to 14 year old kids to spend the weekend in a typical old fashioned farmhouse. The thing is, it was circa 1965, not 1900. It was the kind of place I used to live. The kids hated it! After watching them get smoke in their eyes trying to cook, and get cramped from hours on the floor, I begin to see their point of view. Modern amenities such as walls not made of paper look awfully good after a few days, and unfortunately is often cheaper to build a new house than to add them to an old house. Furniture, plates, printed paper books and other things that are not improving, and that work perfectly well even when they are 100 or 200 years old. Most of the furniture in my house is 50 to 100 years old. It is not particularly valuable but I inherited it from my parents and grandparents and it is perfectly comfortable. The couch has to be recovered every 20 or 30 years; more often if you have a cat. Plates and silverware last for hundreds of years with normal use. Furniture for babies and small children should be replaced because the newer versions are safer. Artwork on traditional media lasts for hundreds of years. I mean oil paint on canvas. There is no telling how long acrylic paint will last. Vincent Van Gogh use the latest high-tech synthetic paint in the 1880s, and the colors had changed completely. It is a shame he did not stick with the ancient formulations developed in ancient Rome and medieval Europe. A surprising number of personal objects, hand tools, artists equipment, drawing tools and other small objects are long lasting. I use screw drivers and other tools from the 19th century. Antique surveyors transits and other optical gadgets work perfectly well, although nowadays I guess they use GPS enabled ones. These things do not add up to much mass, but they cost a lot of money so making them long-lasting is an advantage. - Jed
