The article talks about clothing, but there's so much more that we've lost the ability to fix.
A trick I picked up at my last job was to use Rubber Renue[0] (one bottle will last virtually forever since you need so little) on the pickup rollers on laser printers when they started having paper pickup problems. Works like a charm, but that stuff is nasty. I also learned the delicate art of using a screwdriver to scrape toner deposits off of the fuser. In both cases, these are parts that are easily replaceable because the printers were designed to be maintained, but tight budgets made repairing the parts necessary. Ironically, the deposits on the fuser were due to budgets that necessitated buying cheap knockoff toner.
I still use the Rubber Renue on my 12-year-old printer at home. My girlfriend's reaction to my printer jamming was "It's time to buy a new printer!", which horrified me because the problem is so minor and so easy to fix. We do want a colour printer though, so I've been researching to find one that's maintainable instead of disposable. So far the laser printers from the usual suspects (Brother, HP) look like they haven't been affected by the same disposable mentality that inkjet printers have.
For printers I've learned to look beyond the known brands. OKI seems to be focused on the professional market but has some very great value home printers. Big & clunky but can do a lot and look very solid.
OKI showed up during my research, but I didn't mention them since they're a relative unknown to me. They have some printers that tick all the boxes though, so they're certainly in the running.
I had an OKI printer in the late 80s and that thing was bulletproof. I dropped it down a flight of stairs while moving it once and it just needed some minor alignment adjustment to work again. Glad to hear they still make good stuff.
My solution: don't print. I find very few reasons to print anything. I get kinda irritated when I have to. I donated blood recently and was miffed that the RapidPass required printing out. Why? I have a phone.
I print very little. The half-capacity starter cartridge in my Lexmark lasted a decade (literally - I bought the printer in late-2005 and had to track down a new cartridge in 2016) before I finally needed to replace it. I guess I averaged something like 20-30 pages per year over that time.
My girlfriend, on the other hand, prints a lot more (still, probably under 20 pages per month). Most of it is things that actually need to be printed, like paper-piecing quilting[0] patterns where you need to cut pieces out in order to use them as a guide for sewing. Colour is helpful for these too.
The nice thing about a laser printer is it can go months without printing and when I click print it just wakes up and does its job and goes back to sleep after a bit.
A trick I picked up at my last job was to use Rubber Renue[0] (one bottle will last virtually forever since you need so little) on the pickup rollers on laser printers when they started having paper pickup problems. Works like a charm, but that stuff is nasty. I also learned the delicate art of using a screwdriver to scrape toner deposits off of the fuser. In both cases, these are parts that are easily replaceable because the printers were designed to be maintained, but tight budgets made repairing the parts necessary. Ironically, the deposits on the fuser were due to budgets that necessitated buying cheap knockoff toner.
I still use the Rubber Renue on my 12-year-old printer at home. My girlfriend's reaction to my printer jamming was "It's time to buy a new printer!", which horrified me because the problem is so minor and so easy to fix. We do want a colour printer though, so I've been researching to find one that's maintainable instead of disposable. So far the laser printers from the usual suspects (Brother, HP) look like they haven't been affected by the same disposable mentality that inkjet printers have.
[0] https://www.mgchemicals.com/products/cleaning-products-for-e...