The Environmental Impact of the Razor Blade Model
Companies make money, for the vast majority it is their raison d’être – the more money they make, the happier they and their shareholders will be. Environmental issues are largely irrelevant to this bottom line, unless it affects demand for their products or is impacted through legislation of some sort.
This problem is perhaps illustrated by the slightly corrupted version of the razor blade business model developed by Gillette many years ago. Their idea was to develop a disposable razor that could use replaceable blades, the idea being that you eliminated the risk the customer would buy another disposable razor. You would create a loyal, repeat buying customer who would return to buy the replacement blades over and over again.
Now for our corrupted version, at least from an environmental perspective – from a profit making standpoint it’s pure genius. It is operated by just about every printer company in business. What they do is produce their printers at a very low cost, often making minimal profit and sometimes even as a loss leader. You then feel pleased with your shiny new printer at an extremely reasonable cost. Then comes the realization when your printer runs out of ink. You price up the replacement toner cartridges and realize the cost is actually far in excess of the original printer.
That’s the model, you suck the customer in with a cheap printer – they then are locked into buying your replacement toner. The model only breaks when people get fed up of paying a fortune for these consumables and start to refill themselves. This problem is solved by the printer companies developing extensive systems to prevent people reusing or recycling these toner cartridges. Fortunately it is still possible and many sites contain information showing how you can refill toner for the majority of these cartridges.
This situation highlights our problems, it is in none of our companies interest to be environmentally friendly. In the printer industry, they are actually much less ‘green’ than they were 10 years ago. Investing in technology to force us to consume more and restrict the options of recycling.