Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
What we really need is financial penalties on companies that make stuff deliberately hard to repair. Set up a department of the Consumer Rights Bureau (or whatever it&#x27;s called) where people can report devices the&#x27;ve been unable to fix due to deliberate obfuscation&#x2F;etc., and that forces manufacturers to refund the consumer the entire purchase sum of that device no matter how old it is.<p>Anecdote: my washing machine recently broke the main bearing, and I was going to fix it. Even found a nice teardown&#x2F;reassembly vid on Youtube of the exact same model (a bit older than mine). After 2 hours of work, I discover Bosch has gone from using screws on the outer drum to plastic welding it shut. So fixing it means replacing the entire assembly, costing 2&#x2F;3 of a new machine and with a four week delivery time for the part. I learned this is only done to screw consumers over, and that all manufacturers do it now. The drum still has all the mounting tabs for being screwed together, so they&#x27;re literally just saving $0.30 on screws.