A phone with a tired battery. A laptop with a broken charging port. A washing machine with one failed sensor. Each of these could keep working for years. Yet their owners keep running into the same wall: the part is unavailable, the manual is locked away, the diagnostic software is reserved for "authorized" technicians, or the thing is glued shut so tightly that a ten-minute fix turns into an afternoon of prying. Faced with a repair that feels inconvenient, expensive, or quietly discouraged, most people give up and buy a new device.
Multiply that small surrender across millions of households and businesses and you get one of the fastest-growing waste streams on the planet. The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found that the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022 — and only 22.3 percent of it was formally collected and recycled in an environmentally sound way. On current trends, annual e-waste is projected to reach roughly 82 million tonnes by 2030.
The right to repair is the most direct answer we have. It means giving people — consumers, independent shops, schools, hospitals, farmers, small businesses — real access to the parts, information, tools, and software needed to keep the things they already own alive. Extend the life of a device and you cut waste, lower household costs, keep competition honest, and push manufacturers to build for durability instead of designing for the next upgrade cycle.
Ownership should mean the ability to maintain
Owning something you can't keep working is a strange, hollow kind of ownership. If you buy a device, you should be able to swap a worn part, choose whoever you trust to fix it, or take a careful shot at it yourself — without hitting barriers the manufacturer built on purpose.
That takes more than permission to pop the case open. Replacement parts have to be available at fair prices. Service manuals and diagnostics have to be accessible. Independent technicians need the same essential tools and software the authorized networks get. And products should be designed so the parts that commonly fail — batteries, screens, ports, switches, fans, storage drives — come out without destroying everything around them.
Software has quietly become part of the problem. Some products use digital locks or "parts pairing," where a replacement component won't fully work unless the manufacturer remotely blesses it. A physically perfect part throws warnings, loses features, or refuses to run because its serial number isn't on file. When that's done without a genuine safety or security reason, the manufacturer keeps control of the product long after you've paid for it. The fix isn't to strip away every protection — it's proportionality. Restrictions should answer real risks, not make independent repair impossible by default.
Repair stops waste before it starts
Recycling is good, but it only ever happens after something has already become garbage. Repair steps in earlier, where it counts.
A device is far more than its raw materials. It carries the mining, refining, manufacturing, assembly, packaging, and shipping that went into it. When one cheap component dies and the whole product goes in the bin, all of that embodied work goes with it. Recycling might claw back some metal, glass, and plastic — it can never recover the labor, energy, engineering, and perfectly good parts locked inside an intact machine.
Repair preserves all of it. A new battery lets the processor, screen, cameras, casing, and hundreds of other components stay in service. A repaired power supply keeps an otherwise healthy TV or computer running. Even one or two extra years of use slows the rate at which new devices have to be built and old ones thrown away. This is just the waste hierarchy doing its job: preventing waste and reusing products comes before recycling, and long before disposal. You cannot recycle your way out of a system built around constant replacement.
E-waste is a public-health problem, too
Electronics contain valuable materials — and hazardous ones. When they're processed informally, through open burning, crude dismantling, or acid baths, workers and nearby communities can be exposed to lead, mercury, cadmium, flame retardants, and other pollutants. The World Health Organization singles out pregnant women and young children as especially vulnerable, because that exposure can affect developing neurological, respiratory, and immune systems.
The burden falls unevenly. Devices get replaced in wealthy markets, and a share of the resulting waste ends up handled somewhere else under far more dangerous conditions. Extending product life won't end unsafe recycling on its own, but it shrinks the volume of material entering the stream and buys governments time to build systems that can handle it safely. That makes repair a matter of environmental justice, not just convenience.
Repair means affordability and real competition
When only a manufacturer or its authorized network can complete a repair, you have no leverage. Whoever controls the parts, manuals, diagnostics, and software sets the price and the terms. And when a repair quote creeps close to the cost of a new unit, buying new feels rational — even when the actual failure is a five-dollar part.
Independent repair breaks that up. It lets people compare price, quality, turnaround, and convenience. Local technicians can specialize, community workshops can teach real skills, and refurbishers can put reliable, affordable electronics back into the hands of people who don't want to buy new. That access matters most for essential gear: a broken phone can be someone's only link to work, banking, health care, and family; a farmer may depend on electronically controlled machinery inside a narrow harvest window; a school or small shop may not have the budget to replace a whole fleet over one common failure.
Manufacturers raise concerns about safety, cybersecurity, privacy, and repair quality. Some are legitimate — high-voltage gear, medical devices, batteries, and data-bearing hardware deserve care. But specific risks don't justify blanket restrictions. After examining the arguments, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission reported it found scant evidence for many broad repair limits, and flagged their cost to consumers and competition. Targeted rules handle the real risks better: training and certification for genuinely dangerous work, secure procedures for data-bearing devices, accountability for damage a repairer causes. That's more defensible than locking everyone out.
Repairability should start on the drawing board
A repair gets needlessly expensive when a product is built with glued-in batteries, fragile clips, buried components, or an assembly that demands a full teardown to reach the one part that commonly fails. So the right to repair shouldn't stop at after-sale service — it should shape design.
Manufacturers should have to weigh durability, modularity, and disassembly while they're still designing. Commonly worn parts should come out with ordinary tools. Spare parts should stay available for a clearly defined window after a model is discontinued, and security updates should last long enough that working hardware doesn't go obsolete on a software timer. Buyers deserve to know the expected support period and repairability before they pay.
Repairability labels would make those qualities visible — a score built on parts availability, disassembly difficulty, documentation, software support, and repair cost, so people can compare products on more than looks and sticker price. Policy is already moving this way: the European Union adopted a directive promoting the repair of goods in 2024, with national rules scheduled to take effect from July 31, 2026. Repair is becoming part of consumer law and product regulation, not just a favor manufacturers may choose to grant.
The bigger picture: a circular electronics economy
Repair laws alone won't solve this. Some products will genuinely reach the end of the line — unsafe, unfixable, or truly obsolete. We also need better collection, responsible recycling, an end to illegal waste exports, support for refurbishment, and producers held accountable for what happens to their products at end of life.
The strongest approach follows the whole life cycle: design things to last, support them with parts and software, repair them when they break, refurbish them for a second owner, and recycle them safely only when nothing else is left. Make manufacturers carry a real share of the end-of-life costs their design choices create, and suddenly easy-to-disassemble products look a lot more attractive than glued-together ones.
Consumers have a role, too — choosing repairable products, maintaining what they own, buying refurbished, donating usable gear, using certified collection programs. But that responsibility has limits. You can't choose to repair a device when the manufacturer withholds the part, the software, or the information. Structural problems need structural fixes.
Why this shows up on a repair shop's blog
We fix things for a living, so we'll admit our bias — but the numbers make the case on their own. Every battery, screen, board, motor, and charging port we bring back to life is a product that doesn't get replaced. At the scale of the global electronics market, those individual repairs add up to conserved resources, less hazardous waste, and better incentives for how the next generation of products gets built.
Modern electronics will always involve serious engineering, and some jobs will always need a professional. But complexity should never become a business model for forced replacement. Products can be sophisticated and still maintainable, secure and still serviceable, innovative and still built to last. The right to repair isn't a nice-to-have — it's the foundation of an economy where progress doesn't leave a growing mountain of dead devices behind it.