Gadget makers don’t want you to be able to fix them

It was more important to “repair it right” than to have a right to repair, CESA said.

“We believe repair cannot be undertaken by just anyone . . . There are some repair operations that are easy and for those there are tools available today. There are other key repair operations for major appliances, however, that must be performed by professional repairers, who will take liability and responsibility for their work.”

LG likewise warned against laws that would force manufacturers to reveal schematics to their devices, recommending that “overall community safety and manufacturers’ product technical data are kept protected, that highly technical, complex and confidential data is not accessible where product safety and integrity may be compromised and counterfeit production is a risk”.

Proponents of right-to-repair regulations say electronics companies are merely hiding behind a smokescreen of claims that their goods are dangerous to repair, just to ensure that consumers are forced to discard products and keep buying new ones.

We need to stop talking about recycling as a goal. — Clare Hobby, TCO Development

“The bottom line is that e-waste is a global catastrophe and it’s not dissipating,” said Clare Hobby, the global director of purchaser engagement at TCO Development, a Swedish not-for-profit that provides certification systems that ensure IT products such as notebook computers and servers are repairable and upgradable, reducing their impact on the environment.

The global electronics industry is still pumping out more than 50 million metric tonnes of e-waste every year, less than 20 per cent of which is recovered through recycling or re-manufacturing, said Ms Hobby, who testified at the Productivity Commission inquiry.

As much as 80 per cent of the carbon emissions in the lifetime of a product such as a laptop “happen before it ever lands on your desk”, meaning the carbon footprint of the device could almost be halved just by ensuring its parts were upgradable and repairable so its useful life could be extended from three years to six.

But with the consumer electronics industry resisting efforts to make products last longer, it had fallen upon large corporate and government buyers of IT products to insist on a right to repair, upgrade and refurbish, in the hope of bringing about a change to the broader electronics industry.

“As large buyers, we’re locked into this replace, replace, replace mindset,” Ms Hobby said.

“But what we need to be doing instead is having a conversation with the manufacturers, before we even buy anything, and say to them ‘Our intention is to use these products for at least five years, and once that five-year cycle is up, we intend to either refurbish them, or find some other way to keep them in use as long as possible’.

“We need to stop talking about recycling as a goal. We need to move the conversation up the value chain, to product design. This is what the right to repair is all about.”

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