Engineering ethics: a condition for sustainable innovation
Faced with planned obsolescence, Antoine Lorotte, CEO of FiveCo, calls on engineers and their values to adopt a sustainable and responsible approach by designing products that are robust but also repairable.
To combat planned obsolescence, which results in mountains of waste, engineers must design durable and repairable products.
At the end of August, the Federal Court declared inadmissible the appeal lodged by the association "No to planned obsolescence in Switzerland (NoOPS.ch)". The association had sought to take action against Apple after discovering in March 2017 that software was causing "a degradation of battery performance in certain generations of iPhone". While planned obsolescence is often approached from the consumer's perspective, it is less frequently examined from the producer's point of view. Here, then, is what an engineer thinks about it.
The result of an industrial bias?
Planned obsolescence has been making headlines for some years now. Its origins are traced back to a book written by the American Bernard London in 1932, in which he proposed stimulating consumption through the stratagem of producing objects with a limited lifespan that are not easily repaired. This eventually led to a breakdown of trust between manufacturers and consumers, as evidenced by the many conspiracy theories one can find online.
Yet this phenomenon cannot be understood without analysing industrial design — and more specifically the belief that a product can simultaneously be high quality, developed quickly, and produced at low cost. This principle, established more than thirty years ago by some, has undoubtedly contributed to the accelerating decline in product lifespans.
Designing a product's existence over time
In the journey from idea to the industrialisation of a product, designers have not necessarily been educated to think about its maintenance and repairability — and therefore its durability. Take the example of the race towards energy transition in the automotive sector: industrialists have invested heavily in the electric motor in order to optimise its performance.
In doing so, a fundamental problem has been somewhat overlooked: the potential recycling of the battery, whose lifespan is finite. True, the electric motor is far less demanding in terms of maintenance, but its battery remains an Achilles' heel. The recycling process is known but is energy-intensive, imperfect, and still too costly today. How can one claim the "ecological" label for a technology that continues to overlook the recycling of such an important component? No engineer can any longer afford to neglect these challenges.
What if we returned to "repairability"?
We have all had this experience with household appliances. One wonders why some are more expensive than others with equivalent functionality. But the difference becomes clearer when breakdowns occur. While some brands allow you to repair your objects, others push you directly towards a standard replacement. This is not coincidental, but the result of a balance between optimising production costs and optimising maintenance procedures. Appliances that cost less are often harder to repair — they were not designed with the same objectives. What you do not pay at the point of purchase, you pay later when something breaks. Yet increasingly, consumers want to maintain their objects and look for sustainable alternatives.
The website faitpourdurer.fr, for example, lists objects according to criteria such as longer lifespan, repairability, and warranty duration. In many EU countries, political initiatives are beginning to emerge. In France, from 2020 onwards, certain products will be required to display a repairability index. In Switzerland, nothing of the kind exists yet, although some have begun to mobilise, as demanded by the FRC (Fédération Romande des Consommateurs).
A matter of engineering ethics
Today, a product whose designers have skipped genuine reflection on durability and repairability risks ending its life poorly, with undesirable consequences for its users and the brand's image. Yet as a fervent defender of innovation, the engineer has an ethical duty to place greater consideration on maintenance values. Moreover, these two values must be reconcilable — and a project will be all the more appreciated for achieving this ideal synthesis. It is important to keep this imperative firmly in mind and to ask the essential questions from the very genesis of the product. It is time to adopt good practices. Let us add, however, that the engineer must work under the impetus of a company committed to implementing a sustainable development strategy.
It will then be up to the ethics of engineers to innovate more sustainably.
