It is a daily experience for households that a breakdown of machinery or electronic equipment can cost tens of thousands of forints, if the device has to be taken to a service center or a technician has to be called in for repair. Anyone trying to solve the problem at home should expect to lose the product warranty. The problem has also reached the trigger threshold of regulatory authorities.
In the United States, for example, several states (California, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York) have introduced so-called “right to repair” laws, according to the American economic portal CNBC. From his summaryThese generally require manufacturers to make spare parts, both hardware and software, readily available, and to produce repair manuals that are accessible to home workers.
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Several other US states are preparing to introduce similar regulations. They have wisely waited until the experiments have been born after the first steps. The first such legislation was passed in 2014 in South Dakota. It turns out that there are as many homes as there are habits, meaning that each state’s regulations are quite different. In New York, for example, this does not apply to household appliances, while elsewhere there are separate rules for certain devices, such as lawn mowers and electric wheelchairs.
Without home-made machinery repair, there would be more trash.
At the federal level, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which also serves as the competition authority, has taken up the issue. In a 2021 report to Congress, FTC experts found that restricting consumers’ and manufacturers’ ability to decide how to repair their products would increase repair costs and lead to more e-waste.
In this context, the Commission has drawn the attention of manufacturers not to dare to overly restrict their customers' right to tamper with their products in their warranty terms. According to critics of the legislation, the rules on the right to repair are either too general or too specific, so they may ultimately be useless.
One interesting thing that NGOs dealing with the issue have discovered is that some products are specifically designed to be impossible or difficult to repair at home. So one American organization has created a rating list, where they rank products for the same task in terms of repairability.
It is not easy to qualify repairability.
A similar system already exists in France, and the European Union is also planning to introduce a “repairability index”. This would rank appliances from zero to ten according to how easy they are to repair at home. Ten indicates the easiest products to repair.
The problem is that such systems are subjective and not necessarily permanent. For example, if a manufacturer makes a small change to a component of its home appliance, the repairability of the device may change.
Alex Renauer, a researcher at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, created his own list, which also takes into account a product’s resistance to water and dust. In general, the simplest general rule he came up with was that a product that can be repaired easily is not as durable as a better-built competitor. In other words, a buyer must choose which of these two properties they consider more important.
