Resources > Producers > Consumers > Decomposers > Better Than New

[Ego]

Redwing is now selling refurbished boots and other items at a premium.

https://sameold.redwingshoes.com/

[ertyu]

that sounds great, those are already broken in

[Ego]

The North Face renewed program
https://www.thenorthfacerenewed.com/

They are taking damaged pieces that have been returned and Frankensteining them together, then selling them at regular retail prices.

[Jin+Guice]

Bumping this thread out of personal interest.

There is so much fucking stuff in the first world, I feel like repurpose/ repair will be THE skill if/ when decline/ collapse happens.

Who has experience being a "decomposer" and what are your methods.

It's interesting that the initial discussion in this thread focused on intellectual property rights for well repaired equipment as well as selling repaired goods.

In my mind, the first step would be getting good enough at finding things and repairing them that one would meet their own needs without the need for money?

[Ego]

Better than conventionally made new products. "The future of business is waste." Yvon Chouinard

https://youtu.be/lHx9nDOaXIQ

[clark]

My method of decomposing is taking "worn out" or unused items off the hands of older (and more well-off) relatives. I've received high-quality hiking boots, chainsaws, sofas, dress suits, and more, all needing little to no maintenance to get them functional.

It's a great deal. I pay nothing, and they feel good, knowing that their expensive items is going to someone they care about that will use them, rather than going to a landfill or a faceless Goodwill store. Social connections lower the friction costs of decomposition.

[Ego]

It has been an open secret in crypto that the monkey jpg NFT craze is a proof-of-concept test phase where the bugs are worked out using silly but valuable underlying assets on Ethereum. A few weeks ago Vitalik admitted that every layer 2 and rollup on ETH has a backdoor built in as training wheels to protect when things go wrong. Once this infrastructure has been created, perfected and secured, it will move over to bitcoin and will secure real assets in new ways.

With regard to this thread.....

So how does it scale fairly with multiple fixes? Say I buy one a xᴉɯɐʇᴉʌ from Sclass, and I use it for many years, but then i accidentally knock it off the counter onto a concrete slab floor. Sclass repaired the initial break, but now I need to go another local artisan, to repair the broken display (its originally a new fancy vitamix, apparently) and it is re-rebranded as an xᴉɯɐʇᴉʌ-un.

Who earns as a result of subsequent repairs is an open question. The technological tools to securely track those repairs and improvements is becoming reality with Dynamic NFTs (dNFT).

https://chain.link/education-hub/what-is-dynamic-nft

Generative NFT art projects often have a variety of traits, with some rarer than others. These traits are placed within an NFT’s metadata alongside an IPFS link to an image or video that corresponds to the NFT’s traits. In a dNFT, these traits change based on external conditions.

and

Another case where metadata changes are useful is in the tokenization of real-world assets, where a host of changing metrics are often required. For example, an NFT representing a property could reflect its maintenance history, age, market value, and more. Tokenizing these changing assets therefore requires NFTs which have the ability to update with changing metadata.



These are just a few hypothetical use cases for dNFTs. In reality, changes to a dNFT’s metadata can be triggered by any number of off-chain or on-chain events, speaking to the limitless potential of dNFTs have for expanding the NFT design space.

Imagine a world where a roofer installs a new roof at a discounted price with the stipulation that they earn an annual fee for each trouble-free year. This would encourage long-term solutions, incentivize routine maintenance and might discourage planned obsolescence.

[zbigi]

Imagine a world where a roofer installs a new roof at a discounted price with the stipulation that they earn an annual fee for each trouble-free year. This would encourage long-term solutions and discourage planned obsolescence.

Not hard to imagine, you can do that right now with a regular paper contract.

[Ego]

Not hard to imagine, you can do that right now with a regular paper contract.

I edited it while you were responding. Incentivizing routine maintenance is the challenge. Today roofers encourage a new roof every x number of years whether it needs it or not. They are disincentivized to do a good job on the maintenance once the supposed useful life ends, knowing that a big fail will trigger a new roof and since they are already your roofer, it is likely they will get the job.

[zbigi]

I edited it while you were responding. Incentivizing routine maintenance is the challenge. Today roofers encourage a new roof every x number of years whether it needs it or not. They are disincentivized to do a good job on the maintenance once the supposed useful life ends, knowing that a big fail will trigger a new roof and since they are already your roofer, it is likely they will get the job.

Still, sounds to me that you can still very much do that with a regular, paper contract (you can have a contract that says you'll be paying $x every year to the installer, for as long as the roof doesn't have a major failure). What does the crypto thing bring in that wasn't possible already?

[Ego]

What does the crypto thing bring in that wasn't possible already?

I have a lot of experience dealing with roofers and can tell you that in theory it is possible to incentivize longevity with contracts. In practice it is not.

I am thinking in terms of the controversary over the WEF statement, "You'll own nothing and be happy." Whether it could work under traditional systems is a good question. I don't believe it could. It will take new tools to make it work. Whether it would be desirable is an entirely different question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_ ... d_be_happy

https://web.archive.org/web/20161125135 ... at-that-is

[jacob]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_ ... d_be_happy

Ahh, the original society of abundance. There are two ways to project generic ideology onto this idea. 1) The skill to generate something out of nothing; or 2) Being part of a sharing community that includes enough exogenous generators resulting in a community of surplus.

As for me, I'd definitely be happy if I owned no stock ... but I'd also constantly worry about procuring flow. Stock and flow. The constant tension.

[Ego]

@jacob, I certainly wouldn't want to put myself at the mercy of that kind of system. The question I am interested in is how we would disincentivize planned obsolescence and incentivize longevity. Auken said in the original WEF article...

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability.

Clay and slate tile roofs were made to last forever, with a little maintenance. I will be lucky to get twelve years from the roof on our building, and when we replace it, the waste will be tremendous.

[chenda]

Clay and slate tile roofs were made to last forever, with a little maintenance. I will be lucky to get twelve years from the roof on our building, and when we replace it, the waste will be tremendous.

Same with timber framed windows. They can last centuries but instead we see ever more UPVC double glazed units which generate huge CO2 emissions and end up in landfill in 10 years once the seals have failed.

[Western Red Cedar]

The question I am interested in is how we would disincentivize planned obsolescence and incentivize longevity.

Clay and slate tile roofs were made to last forever, with a little maintenance. I will be lucky to get twelve years from the roof on our building, and when we replace it, the waste will be tremendous.

Couldn't this be achieved with some kind of tax structure or pricing mechanism? Either incentivize more sustainable products or disincentive products with short lifespans? As a society we like to talk about free markets, but typically neglect externalized costs.

[jacob]

The thing is that resources are still outrageously cheap. It therefore costs almost nothing to waste resources churning products in order to maximize profit and maybe labor. Basically, Borsodi's "distribution problem" has been solved to the point where the solution has been so internalized that it's the water the fish swim in.

The solution to longevity must be in increasing the cost of resources. This can be done either by taxing them, regulating extraction rates, or waiting for shortages. I don't think there's any other way. Investing in resource extraction is generally a race to the bottom of the lowest-cost operator.

[chenda]

Couldn't this be achieved with some kind of tax structure or pricing mechanism?

Yes indeed. A tax on concrete, one of the worse building materials for CO2 emissions, would be a good step.

I think the built environment holds the key to slashing global emissions. It's responsible for 40% of global emissions. Throw in car dependency then you're probably looking at half of all emissions. And we already have the technology to build and operate buildings much better than we do.

And linking back to @ego's OP, refurbishing and reusing existing buildings rather than building new is an easy way to preserve the embodied energy (perhaps demolishment is another externality which should be internalised via a tax) And when we do build, designing with future adaptability is essential (another disadvantage of concrete, as it tends to create physical blocks of permanence which aren't readily adaptable to future alterations)

[Ego]

The Massive Guatemalan Operation That Wants to Sell Americans Their Old Clothes Back
https://archive.is/V9V0n

...workers are lifting 80-pound bags of sorted clothes into a shipping container bound for a thrift shop in Gold Coast, Australia—a new wholesale side of the business that Megapaca has been developing. “We buy the clothes from the US, sort them, then sell and ship them,” Peña says. “We’re cheaper than sorting in Gold Coast, and we do it better.” There are, according to Peña, 29,540 pieces of clothing in those Australia-bound bags, sorted to appeal to Gold Coast surfers and others who like to thrift.
...
Peña leads me up a set of metal stairs to a landing where 15 employees in rubber aprons stand over wash basins, scrubbing grime from newly arrived shoes. An experienced employee—paid the minimum wage (roughly $400 per month) plus benefits (Megapaca says these run about $250 per month)—can turn muddy sneakers into a collector-quality pair in roughly three minutes.
...
The tag included a QR code that would track when and where the garment was sold—information that would in turn be fed back into Megapaca’s database, allowing the algorithm to further refine and update the suggested prices shown on the warehouse floor. The QR code also includes the original source of the garment (in this case, a US thrift chain). That data in turn becomes a tool to procure better used clothes. Steven Bethell, co-founder of Bank & Vogue Ltd., a large Ottawa-based clothing supplier to Megapaca and other sorters worldwide, explains how it works: “They can tell me, ‘Get us [items from] that part of New York, not that part of New York.’ They know where stuff that they can sell is located.”