Planned obsolescence: the outrage of our electronic waste mountain

Unrepairable phones and laptops are one of the scandals of our throwaway society. But the pushback is building - and the coronavirus crisis has added more pressure for change

'Imagine you showed someone a smartphone 20 years ago. You said: 'Here's this thing, it's going to be awesome, and it'll cost $1,000. But the manufacturers are going to glue the battery in, and you're supposed to get rid of it when the battery wears out.' You would have thought that notion was completely bananas."

Nathan Proctor is talking via Google Hangouts from Boston, Massachusetts, about an allegedly central feature of modern manufacturing known as planned obsolescence. This is the idea that some of the world's biggest companies have been selling us products either knowing full well that they will only last a couple of years, or having deliberately built a short lifespan into the itemor its software.