DEFYING PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

yonetici | On 14, Eki 2014

DEFYING PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
CIE44 & IMSS’14 Proceedings, 14-16 October 2014, Istanbul / Turkey, Pages: 809-814

DEFYING PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE: PARADIGM CHANGE FOR MACRO LEVEL SUSTAINABILITY
OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

B. Gültekin Çetiner 1 and Mete Gündoğan 2
1

Department of Industrial Engineering
Marmara University, İstanbul, Turkey
drcetiner@gmail.com

2
Department of Industrial Engineering
Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Ankara, Turkey
mtgundogan@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Planned obsolescence with products designed to fail has become the main drive of modern
consumption based economies based on the paradigm promoting growth as an essential activity
for survival. Engineers face nowadays a dilemma when concerning sustainability in problem
solving during engineering applications. They are stuck between the growth, or survival of
businesses through planned obsolescence and the sustainability issues.
For sustainability, majority suggests ways such as optimizing product life (meaning a delayed
planned obsolescence), recycling through waste collection and reprocessing of the resultant
products (reverse logistics), more efficient ways in supply-chain management systems etc. This
is a paradigm paralysis and a paradigm shift is needed for really sustainable world and macro
level sustainability of supply-chain management systems.
This paper analyzes the real root cause of the problem and shows how the unlimited growth
paradigm promoted by the modern money creation called Debt Based Monetary System. It then
suggests a paradigm shift towards defying planned obsolescence for macro-sustainability of
supply-chain management systems.

Keywords: Planned obsolescence, sustainable supply chain management systems, reverse
logistics, industrial design