I often listen to podcasts while I’m walking down to my town centre workspace, or when out and about on errands. Although I’m careful with them and I try to buy quality, earphones don’t tend to last very long. Give them a couple of years and I usually find one side starts cutting out or going crackly, and then I need to replace them.
I learned to use a soldering iron and have tried repairing them in the past, with mixed results. I can repair a loose connection and get a bit more life out of them. Other times I can’t work out what’s broken, or there’s no way to take them apart and put them back together again. They’re not usually designed to be repaired.
Here’s a pair of headphones that are. They’re from Fairphone, whose phone handsets even come with a tiny screwdriver so that you have no excuse for not having a go. Like their phones, these headphones are modular in design, making them easy to repair and reassemble.
There are eleven components here that will be available to buy as spare parts. If something snaps or wears out, you’ll be able to replace it. And if the company develop a better speaker or a lighter battery, you can upgrade.
Fairphone are pioneers of ethical supply chains in electronics, and that’s true here too. They use recycled plastics and aluminium, and these are the first headphones to include Fairtrade certified gold. A fair wage was guaranteed to everyone involved.
This doesn’t come cheap, though at £219 there are many more expensive headphones out there. But as Fairphone have consistently shown, electronic products are cheap for a reason, and the exploitation of global labour is hidden several layers deep when we come to buy the product itself. Better electronics are possible, and fair wages are possible. It just costs a bit more to do thing properly. And if they last long enough and are as repairable as they say, maybe that price is entirely fair.
The Earthbound Report 