Let’s claim our right to repair

On Day 6 of the European Week for Waste Reduction, we want to draw attention on the right to repair, and one specific European movement around it.

As you know, the EWWR is this year focusing on the waste that is out of sight to most of us, the “invisible waste”, that results from the manufacturing process of products. If you went through the materials we published for this year’s campaign, you are probably also aware about how much the footprint of a certain product really weighs on our shoulders. But do you know about one of the ways out of it?

Repair is essential to make sure that products last longer, reducing the need to extract new virgin resources, contributing to reduce the invisible waste and the climate impact that comes with it. Unfortunately, no matter how much we want to get an object fixed, sometimes there are serious barriers to it.  This may be because spare parts and repair manuals are hard to find, repairing may be more expensive than buying new, or a product may simply not be designed to be fixed. Sometimes there may even be legal barriers, as well-depicted by the case of Apple against the one-man repair shop in Norway.

The practice of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain period of time, is called “planned obsolescence”.

Here comes the importance of good legislation at local, national and EU level to remove this kind of barriers. The Right to Repair campaign, asks for a universal right to repair and ambitious policy measures to achieve it. Furthermore, the campaign aims to empower citizens and consumers and make them aware of the power they can have in making a positive change for the planet and for their communities.

Interested in joining the movement? Visit this page.