On March 22nd, the EU Commission signed off on a proposal that it hopes will get consumers and manufacturers to repair common household appliances and personal electronic devices rather than replace them with new ones when they malfunction.
Enshrining the consumer’s ‘right to repair,’ the proposal would require manufacturers to repair products beyond the EU-regulated, two-year warranty (even if not for free); require consumers to repair appliances if fixing them costs less than replacing them; require manufacturers to provide information on repairing the product, and establish a website where consumers can find and compare repair services.
The European consumer organization BEUC gave the proposal a mixed review. It hailed enshrining ‘the right to repair’ for consumers but lamented that the Commission would impose repairs on citizens. More than anything, BEUC wanted the proposed regulation to require longer warranties on products.
“What is crucially missing are longer legal guarantee periods for certain goods where the two-year coverage remains insufficient,” the statement said.
A week later, EuRIC, the European recycling industry, hosted a side event in Brussels that addressed its role in the circular economy.
“Regardless of what you read in the press, the average lifetime of household appliances is actually growing, it is not becoming less,” said Paolo Falcioni, director general of APPLiA, the European appliance industry association, according to Euractive.
But Falcioni’s claim does not reflect the experience that consumers have with appliances and electronics.
A recent survey of Spaniards by a Spanish consumer organization showed that while most consumers believe it would be better to repair than replace broken appliances, they rarely do. One reason is that they believe the life span of common electronics and home appliances is short. But they cited several additional reasons for replacing a small appliance, such as a coffee maker, rather than repairing it: a malfunction is a chance to upgrade or just enjoy buying a new product; repairs are inconvenient as the repair service might be far from home, and their confidence in the quality of repairs is low. They said, too, that in some cases the repair technicians themselves were the ones to suggest that it would be better to replace the device as the repair would cost more than a new one. When asked what strategies would help consumers change their habits, the consumers themselves recommended making appliances easier to take apart, as well as using more modular components that were easier and cheaper to replace in their construction. They also wanted it to be easier to find repair services.
Rules related to the circular economy are designed to address these consumer concerns, but such solutions are far from simple. In the case of the EU and its regulations, the devil is in the details.
The appliance repair proposal is just one way the Commission hopes it can micromanage the bloc’s ‘value chain’—and even consumer habits—in order to bend it into a circle.
Of course, the circular economy and its conscientious, empowered consumer, are themselves just one part of the Green Deal—the aspect dedicated to “decoupling of economic growth from resource use” by making
almost all physical goods on the EU market more friendly to the environment, circular, and energy efficient throughout their whole lifecycle from the design phase through to daily use, repurposing and end-of-life.
In a circular economy, the thinking goes, resources such as minerals and metals are not just carelessly extracted, transformed, and sold in a linear race to the bottom line—money—but rather they are used and reused as long as possible all along ‘the value chain.’ In this way, an industrial economy should be able to both conserve natural resources and reduce the unwanted by-product of the capital-industrial complex, namely, trash. So, ideally, the coffee maker gets repaired as many times as possible, supported by the ‘right to repair’ legislation, before its components are taken apart to be resold or recycled.
In March 2022, the Commission rolled out the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the instrument meant to take the reconfiguration of the EU’s economy from theory to practice.
It follows the model of the Ecodesign framework, the legal framework underpinning the longstanding bloc-wide familiar rating system on the efficiency of appliances and electronics, but necessarily makes a leap into much broader regulation.
The ESPR is meant to make everything from a pair of jeans to solar panels “more durable, reliable, reusable, upgradable, reparable, easier to maintain and refurbish, and energy and resource efficient,” as well as easier to recycle or remanufacture.
Just for starters,
The Commission has identified that product categories such as textiles, furniture, mattresses, tyres, detergents, paints, lubricants, as well as intermediate products like iron, steel, and aluminium, have high environmental impact and potential for improvement, and may thus be suitable candidates for the first workplan.
A major part of the plan is Product Passports. Instead of simple letter-based rating systems, products will have bar or QR codes containing detailed information about the product related to its recyclability, durability, repairability, and so on.
EU governments at the Council’s first debate on the proposal last October raised concerns that the passport could end up being unenforceable, since asking surveillance authorities to monitor too many details about product information could overwhelm them.
Even the Commission acknowledges that it has not always been able to keep up. For example, the explanatory document for the ESPR revealed that for some products the current ecodesign regulations took 6, 7, and 8 years of study when they were expected to be drawn up in three-and-half years, plus, some appliances have remained unregulated partly because of the limited capacity of EU bureaucracy. Additionally, discrepancies between test conditions and real-life conditions have led to a few lawsuits against the EU by manufacturers.
Industry is warning that at the level where the passports are put to use—recycling centers for example—attempting to ensure nothing escapes the conveyor belt of the circular, industrial economy of scale can also be difficult.
“If you visit recycling plants, you see the [large] volumes we recycle,” Tess Pozzi, EuRIC’s institutional affairs director, said at the Brussels event. “If the digital passport would be used, I’m really not confident that we as recycling plants with hundreds and hundreds of tons could [scan] each product.”
She noted that a third of products collected at recycling centers could be reused or sold second-hand, but that recycling centers could only reasonably handle scanning large appliances and industrial equipment. They won’t be able to rescue all the coffee makers tossed away too soon, let alone the old wedding dresses and jeans.
Falcioni, from the European appliance industry association, acknowledged that appliance manufacturers are prepared to do their part to ensure that 100% of e-waste gets recycled, but that achieving the goal would have to go beyond requirements for product design.
He remarked, Euractiv reports, that it is impossible to design products today for recycling technologies still not invented, saying “there is an inevitable tension that we have to work together to fix.”
“It’s not only product design, but it’s the entire value chain that should be designed circularly and sustainably,” he said.
The Commission is actually well aware of this. The detailed product design requirements of the ESPR are intended to serve as a lever to bend the entire value chain into a circle, though who or what will give is still being worked out as the ESPR goes through negotiations in the EU Parliament and the Council.
It’s foreseeable that not unlike many sweeping EU policies of the Green Deal, no one, whether consumer groups, ecology groups, or industry, will be satisfied.
But all the regulating will sure keep Brussels bureaucrats busy.
