[maxerickson]

Someone who can do the work of repairing appliances can make good money doing something else. As the manufacturing cost goes down, it really does make less and less sense to support repair.

It's clearly a local optimum, ideally you'd do the engineering to make repair cheap too, but I don't see how you climb out of it.

[noir_lord]

Tax the externalities unless we can efficiently recycle everything power efficiently.

I.e. increase the cost of cheap disposable manufacturing so that making things repairable is the better economic decision (and better environmentally).