“Premature Ejection” Corrected As EU Passes Right-To-Repair Bill
First instance of the consumer-driven “circular economy”
Amid the tumult of the war in Ukraine and the trial of Trump, muffled reports of a victory for consumers in Europe are beginning to be noticed.
The “right-to-repair” movement has just scored a significant achievement: passage in the EU Parliament of a series of measures that put ‘product power’ into the hands of consumers. Its bigger significant is that it marks the emergence of a whale of change from the depths of the marketplace: the first practical sign of the “circular economy”. It is the injection of consumers into a market economy hitherto run by corporate rules.
The changes are being spearheaded as environmental necessities, but their impact will cut through the previously impervious shield of the “free market” and its assumed right to determine all economic conditions.
For two centuries, Americans have been fighting for freedom from the market. Almost two-thirds of young people (18-24) now have a positive reaction to the word “socialism”, compared to only one-third 50 years ago.
Mike Konczal’s book “Freedom From The Market” puts it well: What is unique today is how the economy has been restructured to extend and accelerate our reliance on markets into all aspects of society. For all the language about how markets open up opportunities, they also create dependencies as well. What defines our current way of dealing with markets is not opportunity or choice but, on the contrary, compulsion. Market dependency is a profound state of unfreedom, and freedom requires checks and hard boundaries on the ways markets exist in our society and in our lives.
Liberals and the left have lost a language of freedom that would help us describe this predicament, conceding the terrain to conservatives and those who see freedom only in the marketplace. The distribution of goods in a market economy doesn’t match what we need to live free lives. Health, education, and time are part of the necessary baseline for exercising our freedom, and as such it is necessary that all of us have access to them in roughly equal measure. These goods should not be distributed on the basis of who can afford to pay for them. People are also fed up with the perilous cycles of a ‘market’ economy and the arbitrary power it gives to a small class of people to insulate their wealth from the contributions needed to aid all of society.
I know that’s a lot to pack in to a measure designed to ensure that products can be repaired, but the new law is the one of the first cracks in the armour of total capitalist control. People will now have their say, under the flag of environmental necessity.
Discarded repairable goods account for 35 million tons of waste, 30 million tons of resources and 261 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year in the EU alone.
The environment “cause for all” is now asserting itself over the previous “rule for the rich” social paradigm. In this older model, all social transactions were reduced to economic arguments. This has enabled the rich to sustain an America that has no universal healthcare, that charges students to go to university, and that bleeds homeless people onto the streets. If something does not pass a profit test, it will not be done.
Now, the “cause for all” cudgel is beating that flat. Its immediate hammer is this right-to-repair bill.
In a practical sense, we have all run into situations where our new purchases have broken down for no known cause, seemingly the day the warranty expires. Repairs are often more costly than buying a new replacement.
The new EU rules ensure that producers do not disincentivize consumers’ ability to choose a repair option over throwing away the product. Any obstruction to a repair from a manufacturer’s software or hardware is also banned.
The new law still needs approval from EU member states, but its parliament passed the measure with an overwhelming majority of 584 votes in favour, three against, and 14 abstentions earlier this week, so approval is expected.
Their decision is supported by their citizens; almost 80% of EU citizens say that manufacturers of digital devices should be required to make it easier to repair or replace individual parts.
German Social Democrat lawmaker Rene Repasi praised the new measure for its ability to “empower consumers in the fight against climate change.”
The law would oblige manufacturers to offer repairs for electronic devices and household appliances like fridges, vacuum cleaners and televisions that are deemed “repairable” under EU law.
The right to repair would apply whether the product is under warranty or not. If a warranty has expired, consumers can still claim a repair, for free or at a “reasonable” price, defined as one that considers costs for spare parts and labour.
The new law also attempts to make spare parts more affordable by obliging producers to make replacement parts available to independent repairers at a reasonable price.
Right-to-repair is the first visible measure in the circular economy, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. Its aim is to increase the life cycle of products.
A circular economy is like recycling, on steroids. With recycling, a product loses quality for each new life cycle and ultimately becomes waste. A truly circular economy would involve no new material inputs at all, reducing emissions, waste and eventually costs.
It seeks to reduce waste to a minimum. When a product reaches the end of its life, its materials are kept within the economy wherever possible thanks to recycling. These can be productively used again and again, thereby creating further value.
This is opposed to today’s linear economic model, with its use-and-throw-away pattern. A linear model relies on large quantities of cheap, easily accessible materials and energy. It relies on a philosophy of ‘planned obsolescence’ with built-in limited time spans.
Reusing and recycling products would slow down the use of natural resources, reduce landscape and habitat disruption and help to limit biodiversity loss.
Another benefit from the circular economy is a reduction in total annual greenhouse gas emissions. According to the European Environment Agency, industrial processes and product use are responsible for almost 10% of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU, while the management of waste accounts for another 3%.
A circular economy starts with the birth of the product. More than 80% of a product's environmental impact is determined during the design phase. This has to include packaging, as some 180 kgs of packaging waste are produced each year to support the lifestyles of each individual European.
The EU claims that moving towards a more circular economy could increase competitiveness, stimulate innovation, boost economic growth and create an additional 700,000 jobs in the EU alone by 2030.
There are other benefits. Redesigning materials and products for circular use would also boost innovation across different sectors of the economy. And consumers will be provided with more durable and innovative products that will increase the quality of life and save them money in the long term.
Their Circular Economy Action Plan includes proposals for boosting sustainable products, empowering consumers for the green transition, reviewing construction product regulation, and creating a strategy on sustainable textiles.
The appeal of the circular economy is finding adherents in North America as well. A businesses approach that creates supply chains that recover or recycle the resources used to create their products will allow the shrinkage of a business environmental footprint, trimming operational waste, and using expensive resources more efficiently are certainly appealing to CEOs.
But experience has shown that creating a sustainable circular business model depends most importantly on choosing a pathway that aligns with a company’s capabilities and resources—and one that addresses the constraints on its operations.
There are still huge challenges from switching from a linear to a circular economy. Only 8.6% of the world economy currently is circular. In a world that has now passed the marker of consuming 100 billion tonnes of material a year, this is a huge impact. Further, the cycling rate of resources has gone into reverse. More than 90% of the resources extracted and consumed do not return to the production cycles; they are tossed in the waste bins. In some industries such as fashion, disposes of the equivalent of a truck full of clothes, buried in a landfill or burned, every second. There is more single-use plastic than ever before, for example, and around 40% of tyres end up in landfills or unidentified sites.
This is accelerating climate change.
The essential problem is that product and materials re-cycling requires an infrastructure that add more expense to the product than can be retrieved. Virgin plastic is very cheap; recycling it requires special bins and return mechanisms. Regulations are definitely required to tip the scales, and extend the equation so that recycling makes sense.
Support for the circular economy is growing in the US, so such regulations are likely to be coming soon. Increasingly, the circular economy is being connected, too, to other policy objectives such as net-zero emission.
Many companies are paying attention, and can actually see investment potential in this. BlackRock Inc. runs a Circular Economy Fund that allows investors to support companies transitioning to the new model. As of August 2023, the fund had almost $2 billion assets under management.
175 nations have begun talks of a binding pact to end plastic pollution. Countries such as Canada are banning single-use plastics, including checkout bags, cutlery and straws, pushing stores and restaurants to invest in eco-friendly solutions.
There is much that they can work on. Circular economy opportunities can be found in a number of different sectors from textiles to buildings and construction, and at various stages of a product’s lifecycle, including design, manufacturing, distribution, and disposal.
In textiles, for example, regenerative agriculture can produce organic cotton and other natural fibres, using natural colorings and dye, thus ensuring higher quality and safer garments for the health of consumers and the environment. Higher quality garments also yield clothing that lasts longer, and can be repaired, thrifted, and recycled.
Circular solutions in construction can help in reducing the use of virgin materials, by re-using existing materials or by substituting carbon-intensive materials for regenerative alternatives such as timber.
Electronic goods in such an economy can be refurbished and recyclable, and use biodegradable packaging. In agriculture animal waste can be used more often as natural fertilizers, and can be processed into biogas for cooking and lighting.
According to the Circularity Gap Report (2023) to return to safe limits of consumption, we need to reduce global material extraction and consumption by a third. A globally circular economy will allow us to fulfil people's needs with only 70% of the materials we now extract and use. More than 90% of materials are either wasted, lost or remain unavailable for reuse for years.
This would move human activity back within the safe limits of the planet.
It will require us to get used to new ways of doing things. For travel, for example, we need to embrace car-free lifestyles and roads. We could give up cars and use bikes and low-speed vehicles and ride-sharing—especially in urban areas—and boost work-from-home time to commute less. This means Investing in high-quality public transport like trams, buses and city rails, while creating safe cycling routes and car-free city centres. For construction we would need to use less material that is designed to last longer. More circular use of materials in just four key industrial materials (cement, steel, plastics, and aluminum), can help reduce global GHG emissions by 40 percent by 2050. For product production we would need to use material-efficient development pathways that stabilise material use.
It will affect us in almost every product line. Telsa already faced class action suits to forcing consumers to come directly to it for service and parts. Musk’s automaker, argued, "has caused Tesla owners to suffer lengthy delays in repairing or maintaining their EVs, only to pay supracompetitive prices for those parts and repairs once they are finally provided."
Tesla was also being accused of unlawfully tying repairs and parts to the purchase of a Tesla EV by prohibiting vehicle owners from going to third-party repair shops or seeking aftermarket parts.
"Tesla needs to open up its ecosystem and allow competition for the servicing of Tesla [vehicles] and sales of parts," said plaintiff lawyer Matthew Ruan.
Without the right-to-repair legislation behind them, the plaintiffs failed to make their case. They could not prove that Tesla coerced them into using its services and parts simply because they had bought their vehicles in the first place. Such proof would not have been needed in the circular economy, where it is already the practice that drivers whose vehicles are powered by traditional engines can have repairs done at dealerships or independent shops, and use parts made by original manufacturers or other companies.
The computer industry is taking a different tact. Last year California governor Gavin Newsom passed a Right to Repair Act that guarantees everyone access to parts, tools, and manuals needed to fix their electronic devices. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, had aggressively lobbied against it for years. When the law came out, Apple swung around in support of it. Now Apple is even making parts available to repair shops.
As it turns out, however, their new iPhone 15 is riddled with software locks that cause warning messages to pop up or functionality to be lost if parts are replaced with new ones that weren’t purchased directly from Apple. The right to repair battle is far from over.
Globally, if the world implemented more circular activities such as recycling, repair, rent, and remanufacture, it would create 6 million new jobs by 2030.
Europe just produced more energy from wind than from coal. And in California recently the sun was shining and the wind was blowing and renewable energy met all the state’s needs for power. The circular economy is advancing.
Tomorrow will look a lot different from today…which is a good thing for our children.
Thank you for writing this, it resonates deeply with me. I grew up in Europe where it was quite normal to use something till it breaks and can no longer be repaired. Including clothes and shoes. My dad used to fix pretty much everything himself at home and was good at it, and we were a "middle class" educated family. But then again he was an environmental chemist. When I moved to the US some 15 years ago I was first baffled at the tendency of people to just throw away stuff because they got tired of it and/or just to keep buying something new. You know the "consumer driven" economy. Then I had to get used to it and nowadays you can't find anyone to repair anything and thanks to the "planned obsolescence" it breaks just the day after its warranty expires. Don't even get me started with the plastic shoes and clothes that are now 98% of everything available out there, even at the Goodwill stores. I don't know how we come back from this. However, Blackrock is the last entity that I would consider a leader in this, they (and the likes of them, private equity firms) are actually the cause for this total and complete disconnect between manufacturing, consumer and the community. Them creating a fund to invest in circular economy manufacturing is like putting a lipstick on a pig. I don't have a good feeling about anything happening anytime soon in the US to reverse this. Just my two cents.