Whether it's blending or
boiling or toasting your bread when it comes to appliances.
I
have a new air fryer.
The microwave, kettle, toaster.
We
can't get enough.
A coffee maker and a really nice kettle.
A toaster, toaster sandwich maker, probably a slow cooker.
But all good things come to an end.
I had a bread maker that
kind of carked it.
And some sooner than others.
Replaced the
toaster, I've replaced the kettle.
Question is, what happens to
the broken parted?
Well, I'm hoping they get recycled.
We
know that it's been, that everything's been built to
barely survive.
To get to the bottom of it, we joined Paul
Smith down in his Wellington basement.
He's taking brand-new
mixers and breaking them himself.
So many of these small
appliances break anyway and we want to find out what happens
to them when you take them back to the shop.
He's an
investigator for Consumer NZ.
His covert project is
addressing the right to repair issue.
He hopes it will get
people thinking about sustainability and what this
means for our households.
Do you think that it is easy to fix,
like could you fix it?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, all I've done
is taken a wire off.
Before reassembling, he fits a GPS
tracker.
It's as if they'd created this little compartment
just for our trackers.
It means they can follow the appliance
to its final resting place.
Same treatment for four
different brands.
Kmart's own brand for $75, Living & Co
from the Warehouse, $80.
Breville from Briscoes, $450.
Kenwood from Farmers, $740, $520 dollars on sale.
Paul set off
to return them.
Project Mixer was underway.
The drop off was
step one starting with Kmart and The Warehouse where...
They
didn't even open the box to check there's a mixer inside.
No one checked at Briscoe's either.
But at Farmers.
Actually took it out of the box, turned it on to make sure
that it had the fault that I said it had.
Finally.
Finally,
somebody checked.
Which takes us to step two, tracking the
appliance wherever it went.
Paul and co-investigator Tom
were glued to the screen.
No work happened for about the first
three days.
Paul would just run over to my desk and be like, hey,
look, it's moving, it's moving!
The Kmart and Warehouse ones
were the first to go.
It took hardly any time to reach their
very final place of rest.
No one opened the box, noone
looked at them, they were just buried in a big hole in the
ground.
Not that they should have been surprised.
And when
we returned it to Kmart and we asked the girl, hey, so what's
going to happen to this now?
She was very clear.
I'm
going to take it out the back and chuck it in the bin.
Thankfully, it was a different story for the pricier mixers.
They hang around in the store for about four or five weeks,
both of them.
Then the trackers got going, both of them winding
their way to Auckland.
Breville mixer from Briscoe's went straight to
Appliance Outlet.
They refurbish and repair and resell
appliances and we watched these mixers go back on sale on their
website and they were selling them for a hundred and fifty
dollars.
We...
full price they're $450.
So somebody could get a
real bargain by picking up a refurbished mixer with a full
warrantee for a hundred and fifty dollars.
The Farmers
Kenwood mixer stopped at this place at Auckland Airport.
They
hoped it was headed overseas for repair.
But within about a
week and it ended up at a place called Computer Recycling.
No
interest in refurbishing and reselling.
They were just going
to shred the appliance and send the metal for recycling.
Fair
Go wanted to double check a repair was possible.
So I took
one of the cheaper mixers with an identical problem.
So here
it is.
To see if it really was an easy fix.
Gonna be testing
me to the the limit here.
Richard Ford helps out at
Wellington's repair cafes.
A huge variety of things.
He has
no idea what the problem is but says modern appliances are
always a tougher task than ones from years gone by.
Smaller,
thinner plastic that breaks easily, the switches aren't the
same quality.
Manufacturers don't want you to repair their
kit.
They actually actively make it hard.
So they put
unusual screw heads inside the machine.
Oh, there's a problem.
So inside here, if you look, there's two cables.
This is the
main panel.
This this this blue jack here should be plugged
into the power supply.
As soon as I plug that in there, I
reckon it's going to work.
We've seen this quite a lot,
especially with things that vibrate.
And just to test it.
So it sounds like it's working.
So on a scale of one to 10, how
easy was that?
0.5.
That's the best best case,
it didn't take any time at all.
So given that, what do
you think of the fact that that's all that was wrong with
it and yet they sent it straight to the landfill?
That's a real problem.
This has value.
Let's not throw it away.
Let's keep them going for a few more years.
Yeah, that that
even that's if that's never been used.
That's insane that's
they were going to throw it away.
Back to Project Mixer
where it's time for step three, interrogation?
Yeah, exactly.
So, once we knew where everything was going to end up,
we got in touch with the companies.
Fair Go did too.
Bear in mind, a product returned under warranty becomes
the property of the supplier.
So the De'Longhi Group NZ which
owns Kenwood says products go to a recycling initiative
operating in New Zealand which is what we saw.
It adds its
repair and resale program, currently operating in
Australia, will expand to New Zealand in the next 12 months.
And top marks to the Briscoes Breville Partnership.
Briscoes
says it encourages its suppliers to repair and resell
through a third party and that's what happened here.
The
Warehouse says it works with a third party return center that
evaluates whether products should be repaired, recycled,
or dumped but it admits that didn't happen to this mixer.
It
says it will take this learning and keep improving and from
Kmart, not a peep.
The project mixer investigators are
unimpressed but not too surprised.
Realistically, in a
$80 mixer, even if it's an easy repair, there's no, it's never
going to be repaired because there's no margin in it, right?
But I feel like they should build in the cost of recycling
as part of just like kind of social responsibility.
And if
you want to avoid your next appliance getting dumped before
its time.
I would say don't go to The Warehouse and Kmart and
buy cheap mixers.
They're just going to end up in landfill.
Go
to somewhere like Appliance Outlet and buy a good mixer
that's been refurbished because you're stopping other products
being thrown away and you're getting a better mixer for it.