The Waste Makers

Sometimes, however, an environmental warning has an unexpected source, a fiction or nonfiction writer who, for reasons of his or her own, chooses to produce a work about a new threat to the environment. This was the situation when Vance Packard wrote his 1959 best-seller The Waste Makers. Packard s book took as its subject planned obsolescence, the policy adopted by many manufacturers to build the products they made to be out of date in a predictable period. 

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