Things That Don’t Make Sense: LED Bulbs Built to Fail

If we reach lightbulb saturation – meaning, every home has long-lasting lightbulbs installed – it will be hard for lightbulb companies to sell the same quantity of products they do today. So some are designing LED lightbulbs purposefully designed to burn out sooner, or lights that require frequent upgrades or replacements to function properly. 

Gideon Weissman

Former Policy Analyst, Frontier Group

A recent New Yorker piece gave me an excuse to update my list of “things that don’t make sense.”  Here’s what I learned:

LED lightbulbs can last for 50,000 hours. If you keep them on 12 hours a day, that’s more than 11 years, or about 50 times longer than an incandescent bulb. And LED bulbs do that while only using about 10 percent of the energy of incandescent bulbs to produce the same amount of light.

Here’s where the nonsense starts.  If we reach lightbulb saturation – meaning, every home has long-lasting lightbulbs installed – it will be hard for lightbulb companies to sell the same quantity of products they do today. So some are designing LED lightbulbs purposefully designed to burn out sooner, or lights that require frequent upgrades or replacements to function properly. (This is a continuation of an old story – in the 1920s leading lightbulb companies formed Phoebus, a global cartel that fixed lightbulb lifetime at 1,000 hours.)

Let’s think about it. Humanity faces global challenges that will only be met by reducing our energy use, and reducing our waste.  So we’re designing new lightbulbs that have to be replaced a lot sooner.

The fact that companies produce products built to fail isn’t close to shocking. It fits a familiar pattern: car companies adopting planned obsolescence, soda companies moving from returnable glass bottles to disposable plastic ones, shopping bags made from petroleum but designed to be used once, food containers and coffee cups thrown away by the billions. Waste has become a given, a constant that we barely notice. Not surprisingly, our rate of consumption is unprecedented: In the 20th century, global resource usage rose at about twice the rate of population.[pdf]

We have a choice to make, as a society: Do we rethink our priorities, reduce our impact on the planet and build a sustainable future? Or do we continue producing waste and pollution, keep calling it progress, and condemn our kids to a bleaker future?

Authors

Gideon Weissman

Former Policy Analyst, Frontier Group