Introduction In business actions always arise a lot of ethical questions. The main goal of all companies is to earn profit but it is not always in perfect harmony with the ethical codes of the society. People tend to observe ethical behavior of companies more than they used to few years ago. A big issue concerning consumers is the life-time (durability) of a purchased product. There are many rumors among consumers telling that in certain industries the producers are using planned obsolescence to reduce the life-time of a product to a certain period of time. By reducing the life-time of product the manufacturers “force” people to buy new product that the manufacturer brings to the market as the replacement for the old product. The purpose of this research paper is to evaluate all aspects like ethical issues, environmental affects, laws and regulations considering planned obsolescence. The question is whether using this business technique is ethically acceptable or the company that uses planned obsolescence to make higher profit should be punished. Types of planned obsolescence In a marketplace there are more types of planned obsolescence that are used in order to devalue the old product. All types of obsolescence have major task of enhancing sales and increase the company’s profit. The main idea of all obsolescence is the same, to make the old product ineffectual, unfashionable or useless. Technical or functional obsolescence is a common method when a producer on purpose uses low-class materials that are prone to become damaged. The cost of repair work is usually comparable to the replacement cost and that force consumers to buy a new product or spare part. An applicable example is LCD screen where are heat-sensitive components... ... middle of paper ... ... EESC proposes a system of labeling, which should guarantee a minimum product lifespan. It is not a legal obligation yet, but maybe in a few years it would be normal in each state of EU. Mr. Haber also states “Furthermore, manufacturers should also cover the cost of recycling if their goods have an expected lifetime of less than five years” (EESC, 2013). This is a great idea how to motivate manufacturers to produce more durable products or if not so at least pay the cost of recycling in order to protect the environment. To sum up there are still not any laws regulating the production of goods with planned obsolescence, even though European Economic and Social Committee adopts measures against it. Works Cited http://www.eesc.europa.eu/?i=portal.en.press-releases.29603 http://search.proquest.com.proxy.cityu.edu/docview/198170190/8AD083B8560E4CDCPQ/1?accountid=1230
...and the useful life of the machine should be calculated. Then, depending on the method used, the total cost of the machine is considered as a long term asset and depreciated over the life expectancy of the asset.
Product life cycle is an important marketing concept which divides the sales history of a product into distinctive stages (Vashisht, 2005). These different stages would present their own opportunities and opportunities and thus call for different strategies for marketing practitioners. Generally, a product would goes through four stages including introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Home theatre products seem to head towards its declining stage with its sales dropped by about 10% in 2012 in Australia (Euromonitor International, 2013). Its profit is also dropping with more generous pricing competition in this market. However, there is a new trend emerging that could transform the competition landsc...
Meaning corporations purposely make products that won’t last or will be otherwise social unacceptable to own in the near future. This is all a trick to cause the consumer to buy more of a product and spend more money. According to Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff, “[designers] discussed how fast they can make stuff break and still leave the consumer with enough faith in the product to go buy another one” (11). This fuels consumption further than necessary and most importantly at an alarmingly wasteful way. Nothing shows more obsolescence than the technology market with computers and phones. Giles Salde wrote an award winning book about technology obsolescence and explains “a century of advertising has conditioned us to want more, better, and faster from any consumer good we purchase, in 2004 about 315 million working PCs were retired in North America” (Planned Obsolescence viewpoint). This shows the affect caused by corporations to increase profits at the cost of resources. They use new software and products being incompatible with previous versions of electronics to force consumers to buy more. You see this commonly with televisions, gaming systems, computers, and many other electronic
Cooper, T. (2004). Inadequate life? Evidence of consumer attitudes toward product obsolescence. Journal of Consumer Policy, (27), 422.
Caterpillar’s Chairman and CEO, Doug Oberhelman is a member of the Board of Directors of the WRI. The WRI is an environmental group that uses research to find applied ways to safeguard the earth and improve people’s existence (“Sustainability Report,” 2012). Remanufacturing is one of the processes that Caterpillar utilizes to create sustainability throughout the world. Remanufacturing avoids waste through its salvage of materials and the associated resource savings. Sustainability organizations need to forge sustainability strategies which distribute them with cost-effective benefits and social benefits accomplished through environmental accountability. This paper will analyzing different ethical, legal, and economic issues relevant to sustainability as it pertains.
For instance, Primark 's products offer customers clothing as a base product, of witch actual benefits are being to be cheap and trendy, and they may have some return policy as augmented benefit in case of defects. Each product may be realised following a new product development process to improve its success rate (Harris and Schaefer, 2015, p.43-47).
Moreover, the industry is quite innovative because old products are constantly improved and new products are regularly a...
Biswas, Lucata, McKee, Pulling, and Daughtraige (2000) claim that recycling objectives or items reduces its economical value because the product costs rely on its used materials more than the manufacturing service. Therefore, recycled items are usually cheaper than no recycled ones; but still consumers prefer the products that is not recycled because of its higher quality that the recycled product (Biswas et al., 2000).
That creates an incentive to manufacture products with built-in obsolescence. As C.W. Nevius points out in an article for SFGate, fix-it guys are rapidly disappearing. Why pay to have an appliance repaired when it wouldn't cost much more to buy a new one? Many small appliances like toasters and microwaves have become throw-away
Understanding the life cycle of either a product or process is vital to understanding how resources should be used. Also, the success of a product or service may be impacted by the understanding of the life cycle. Author Gherasiam (2011) believes that a product has a limited life, the product selling evolution has different stages, profit levels are different at each level of the life cycle, and marketing strategies should differ from stage to stage.
As people become more concerned with recycling and saving the planet, there has been a growing movement to source old unneeded items to reuse in the manufacturing of new inventions. Not only can this result in lower overheads for makers, it can also keep broken or obsolete items out of landfills. For example, 26 year old Jack Zylkin modified an old typewriter so that it could be used as a standard keyboard (Kalish 2010). Rather than going out and buying all the necessary components to make a new typewriter from scratch that is compatible with modern computers, he literally just took an old typewriter as is and did a minimal amount of work to create his finished piece, which saves him both time and money and is also better for the earth.
2. (1) Benefits of the “half-life”: it will encourage the company to reduce cost and defective rates. The total quality of the production has been improved.
With the creation of newer technologies, such as smartphones, that are made more complexly made, recycling these devices are becoming much more difficult. Not only are these technologies difficult to recycle, but the accessories that come with them. The majority of people who own an expensive smartphone want to protect it with a phone case, and typically in style. The smartphone market is extremely competitive and with that, every year, a new smartphone with a completely new design will be introduced. This then creates a surplus of phone cases as consumers look into switching for the most recent model that has been launched within the phone industry. However, many of the old phone cases are not reusable on newer devices, and are simply thrown out into the garbage and end up at the landfill. Plastic takes at least 500 years to decompose, and some plastics are composed of numerous toxic chemicals, which are then being exposed to the environment. There are currently not many recycling programs that directly address how to dispose of phone cases. Although, doing so is quite crucial as it will only continue to grow as many more models of smartphones will continue to be released in the
Engineering ethics focuses on the behavior of the individual - the engineer, and the development of ethical standards governing their professional activities. Engineering ethics has always existed as a set of rules or a system that governs the behavior of an engineer. Among its main provisions, we can attribute such as the need to faithfully perform engineering work that would bring welfare and do not cause harm to people; be accountable for engineering professional activities; a good relationship ( customs and rules governing relations ) with other engineer, etc.
The PLC indicates that products have four things in common: (1) they have a limited lifespan; (2) their sales pass through a number of distinct stages, each of which has different characteristics, challenges, and opportunities; (3) their profits are not static but increase and decrease through these stages; and (4) the financial, human resource, manufacturing, marketing and purchasing strategies that products require at each stage in the life cycle varies (Kotler and Keller, 2006). Whilst there is a common pattern to a product's life cycle, which is bell-shaped in nature, this pattern does vary depending on the specific characteristics of a given product. These life cycle patterns are illustrated and discussed in the subsequent section.