The cover is cracked. It is time to rip it off, look directly at the inner workings, and begin to fix things for ourselves.
— Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
In 2009, Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft crept onto the bestseller list and into the public imagination. Crawford is a motorcycle mechanic and repair shop owner in Richmond, Virginia, who unexpectedly enough also holds a doctorate in political philosophy. He evoked the worldview of another book that urged readers to play closer attention to what is valuable in their lives, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published thirty-five years earlier. Crawford’s stated approach was “an inquiry into the value of work.” His book’s aim was to examine “the experience of making things and fixing things…and to consider what is at stake when such experiences recede from our common life.”
By the time Crawford’s book appeared, an online open-source repair manual known as iFixit had already been out in the world for several years, spurring computer technicians and tinkerers to keep pace with the relentless stream of digital products entering the marketplace. Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules were still students at California Polytechnic State University in 2003, when they founded iFixit to be the tip of the spear challenging the tech industry from the user’s side. Kyle had begun compiling a collection of pithy statements like “Repair is war on entropy,” “If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it,” and “We have the right to devices that can be opened.” Together, these axioms revealed a developing philosophy but fell short of making a larger, coherent statement.
Then Kyle came across the “repair manifesto” created in 2009 by Platform21, the design collective based in Amsterdam that had also inspired Martine Postma. Some of the statements in the manifesto read more like stage directions for performance art than a political agenda: “Repair survives fashion.” “This isn’t about money, it’s about a mentality.” “You can repair anything, even a plastic bag.”
But Kyle recognized an affinity and sketched out the first version of iFixit’s own Repair Manifesto, articulating the repair ethos in a way that was exciting and clearly attuned to tech culture. A logo of a raised fist clutching a wrench suggested the kind of anarchism celebrated in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which opens with an epigraph by Walt Whitman: “Resist much. Obey little.” The IFixit Repair Manifesto was both a call to action and a declaration of independence for the burgeoning repair movement: We hold these truths to be self-evident…
The Repair Manifesto went viral almost immediately, encouraged by iFixit’s open-source philosophy. Kyle’s purpose was to build community around a powerful set of ideas, and the collection of truisms gathered under the “wrench held high” banner stuck. “Before we came along and started doing this, there was not interest in repair as a holistic umbrella that applies to everything,” Kyle told us. “That’s what’s radical about what we’re doing, what Repair Cafe is doing, and everybody else. We are identifying and seeing acts of repair as fundamentally the same across all disciplines.” Kyle’s Repair Manifesto has now been translated into twenty languages, and you will see iFixit’s poster shared and displayed in work spaces and classrooms all around the world.
Repair as a Political Act
“Tossing things out instead of fixing them has far-reaching consequences — for consumers, for the economy, and for the environment,” writes repair activist Gay Gordon-Byrne in the essay entitled “Why We Must Fight for the Right to Repair Our Electronics,” which she coauthored with Kyle Wiens. “Indeed, a future in which nothing ever gets repaired isn’t bright for anyone except the people trying to sell you new products. And many of us are not prepared to accept that future without a fight.” As a Repair Cafe volunteer in England put it, “When fixing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, repair becomes a political act.”
The ideas expressed by Gay and Kyle represent the guiding philosophy behind the growing Right to Repair movement, an initiative that has been spreading for several years in North America and Europe. The basic legal principle is this: if you own it, you have the right to repair it. We might take this right for granted until we discover that many products are designed so they cannot be repaired by you or me or any repair shop not licensed by the manufacturer, if at all. Many corporations want to capture additional profits when you bring the broken item to them for repair, or when you have no choice but to buy a new one.
Many of our repair coaches, for example, are familiar with “the printer conversation.” Here’s how it goes: When someone lugs in a broken printer, often purchased not so long ago, they are often disappointed by our relatively low success rate in getting it to work again. The ready explanation for this problem is, to many, a revelation: Printers are made as cheaply as possible and may even be sold below cost. This is okay with the company behind the brand because the real profit lies in selling you the ink, “the most expensive liquid in the world.” Marketers call this the “razor and blades model.” As a result, poorly made and quickly discarded printers are the bane of Repair Cafes — and landfills — everywhere.
To further complicate matters, an astonishing array of products now contain embedded software, which manufacturers protect from consumers as intellectual property, making troubleshooting and repair nearly impossible. The first challenge to this emerging state of affairs came in the early 2000s, when carmakers were refusing to sell computer diagnostics to independent auto repair shops. After a decade of effort, an association of independent auto care companies, led by Aaron Lowe, convinced the Massachusetts legislature to challenge that position. In 2012, Massachusetts passed the Motor Vehicle Owners’ Right to Repair Act, requiring carmakers to give independents access to the same diagnostic tools they provide to their franchised dealers. In 2014, to avoid a series of protracted legal battles over the issue nationally, the automotive industry capitulated. The president of the Association of Global Automakers admitted that “a patchwork of 50 differing state bills, each with its own interpretations and compliance parameters, doesn’t make sense.” The Massachusetts law became the national standard. This was a significant win for the nascent Right to Repair movement and for consumers. Turns out, Right to Repair legislation is very popular with voters; the ballot referendum that preceded the Massachusetts law passed with 86 percent of the vote.
In December 2016, at the request of Congress, the U.S. Copyright Office weighed in. After a year-long study, it issued a report concluding that “the spread of copyrighted software…embedded in everyday products…raises particular concerns about consumers’ right to make legitimate use of those works.” The Copyright Office also cited the use of “complex and opaque language to frustrate reasonable user expectations” and found these concerns “particularly acute with respect to products that have not required software in the past.” Moreover, the study argued that federal copyright law couldn’t be used as an excuse to prevent consumers from making their own repairs.
Framed this way, the legal right to repair can be seen as a consumer protection issue, and it is specifically allowed by U.S. copyright law. The problem arises when manufacturers try to circumvent the rules. As an article in Consumer Reports put it, “Can a company that sold you something use its patent on that product to control how you choose to use it after you buy it?”
Some companies are employing tactics that effectively prevent or seriously limit consumer options. Digital locks and restrictive end user agreements are among the practices that benefit only the manufacturer. An editorial in the New York Times in April 2019 stated the situation plainly. “The growing complexity of electronic devices means that people need help from manufacturers. And companies have taken advantage of that shift in power.”
You see this type of deceptive practice reflected in all kinds of David and Goliath stories. And indeed, consumers are fighting back. Farmers are “hacking” their tractors to make the sort of repair that John Deere prohibits in its “end user agreement.” Ryan Finlay, who has worked with appliances for years, wrote his analysis of the “made to break” points in home appliances (refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers), titled “They Used to Last 50 Years.” He’s cofounded a company to build the market for quality used appliances. Austin McConnell, a YouTube blogger in Springfield, Missouri, made a video called “Ink Cartridges Are a Scam,” based on his experience as an over-the-phone technical support person and supported by additional research. The video has been viewed more than five million times. His message: “It’s high time we did something about this. Join me in starting the revolution.” And Jessa Jones has done just that. She’s become a heroine of the repair movement by starting a company called iPad Rehab — a mail-in business that gained a national reputation as the “go-to” place for motherboard repair. Her goal was to teach these repair skills to other stay-at-home moms, give them a place to practice, and instill them with confidence. “The stay-at-home-mom community is huge and full of talent,” Jessa says. “If Apple doesn’t want to repair, fine. But we do.”
HIERARCHY OF REMEDIES
When a product stops working as intended, the owner has a variety of options. In Europe they call this a “hierarchy of remedies,” which might look something like this:
What Consumers Can Do
•Check the obvious: Try a different outlet, wiggle the cord, clean it.
•Consult the user’s guide. (Some products, for example, have a reset button, separate from the on/off switch.)
•Act on the product warranty, if it is in force. (Right to Repair advocates counsel: politely decline extended warranties.)
•Open it up: Do you see something that doesn’t look right? A clog, a leak, a broken part? See appendix 1 for recommended online sources for DIY repair advice.
•Bring the product to a community repair event, or take it to an independent repair person in your town.
•Return it to where you bought it and, depending on store policy, exchange it.
•Ship it to a factory-authorized repair service.
•Buy a new one.
What Manufacturers Can Do
•Ensure that the owner’s manual is available and posted online.
•Make any diagnostic software available to consumers.
•Make replacement parts available to consumers.
•Make any necessary specialized tools (“funny screwdrivers”) available to consumers.
Everyone agrees that companies should be able to reasonably charge for these things, but information and access are essential to an open marketplace for repairs. What is not acceptable is for companies to seek to create a monopoly on repair by keeping information about the product and its components behind the shield of “proprietary” property.
The Battle Lines
What has emerged around the repair movement is a power struggle between the technology companies — the global economy’s largest corporations — and consumers fighting for the right to an open market for repair. Kyle Wiens says, “As the industry gets bigger, there’s more and more money in the internet of things, which means there is more money to prevent these kinds of [consumer protection] laws.” Tech companies, by one estimate, are outspending other interests in their lobbying efforts by a margin of nearly 30 to 1.
But consumer advocates have been active for many years. Gay Gordon-Byrne began her career buying, selling, and leasing large enterprise computers. She started a company that compiled a database of computer failures based on repair records. Her clients were the companies that did the repairs. In 2010, when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and said, “We’re no longer interested in facilitating repairs,” her customers lost 30 percent of their business overnight. She said, “This is wrong” and volunteered with a trade association committee that, three years later, started the Digital Right to Repair Coalition, with Gay as its executive director. The coalition’s goal is to represent the interests of everyone involved in the repair and reuse of technology, from DIY hobbyists to independent repair technicians.
Another repair warrior is Nathan Proctor, a policy director with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group who describes himself as a “career public interest campaigner.” He explained his advocacy this way: “We saw Right to Repair as a strategic place in which people are actually having a conversation about taking back control of the stuff in their lives. People are reinvesting in local skills and local businesses and local resilience, pushing back against the consolidation of Main Street and asking what it means to live within our ecological boundaries. Repair invites that conversation in a lot of different places.”
The remedy, all agree, will be not through the courts but with legislation. The persuasive logic of Right to Repair laws for all types of consumer products is now working its way through twenty-five state houses: Minnesota, Michigan, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and California among them. Support among lawmakers has been remarkably bipartisan. The resistance has mostly played out behind closed doors, with tech industry lobbyists. Repair Cafes and Fixit Clinics are significant grassroots allies in furthering the Right to Repair lobbying effort. When state representatives hear from a community repair volunteer, they are getting the perspective of an expert, who often gives them their first real understanding of how the repair economy is working in their district and how many lives it touches. At a press conference in May 2018, Joe Morelle, the majority leader of the New York State Assembly at the time (he is now a congressman), responded to a reporter: “The big question is why it hasn’t happened already. And don’t get me wrong, we have some big opponents in certain areas. They visit us quite frequently on it. But this is the time to do it because we need to save ownership rights in New York State and protect our environment.”
Somewhat surprisingly, many of the legislative proposals receiving special attention are in response to the experiences of farmers. Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts and an architect of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has advocated for a national Right to Repair law to ensure farmers’ right to repair their own equipment. When she proposed the legislation in March 2019, she put it in the context of leveling the playing field for consumers and corporations. “A company puts out sophisticated equipment and then says if it breaks…you don’t get to repair it at home. You don’t get to take it to a shop in town where there are three competing places. Both of those keep costs down for small farms. Instead, you’ve got to take it back to the one company that sold it to you, and they can charge whatever they want to charge. Because as long as the thing is broken you can’t get any use out of it.”
A follow-up survey of more than one thousand registered voters conducted by the research group Data for Progress in May 2019 asked the following question: Would you support or oppose a policy allowing farmers to repair equipment they own, rather than to have an authorized agent make repairs for them? More than 70 percent of respondents, including Republicans, Democrats, and independents, supported such legislation.
The media also took notice. The New York Times editorial board opined, “Mrs. Warren has the right idea, but she did not go far enough. The owners of consumer electronic products deserve the same protection as farmers,” and concluded, “An open marketplace for repairs benefits consumers, independent retailers and the environment. Modern devices are increasingly complicated; that concept is not.” Other newspapers around the country agreed. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stated that “right-to-repair policy is a smart plan that would have a tangible impact on millions of Americans.”
Nix the Fix?
In July 2019 the Federal Trade Commission hosted “Nixing the Fix: A Workshop on Repair Restrictions,” a public symposium in Washington, D.C., to look at how the advancing technology of consumer products was affecting adherence to federal statutes. The statutes discussed included the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, which was enacted to prevent manufacturers from using disclaimers on warranties in an unfair or misleading manner. In her introduction to the workshop, Commissioner Christine Wilson began by asking who in the room had watched the late 1980s TV show MacGyver. Delighted at the number of hands that went up, Christine said that MacGyver’s practical application of scientific knowledge and inventive use of common items had always inspired her. “But,” she said, “in today’s connected world even MacGyver may have had a bit more difficulty getting out of sticky situations. I’m not sure he could fix a smashed smartphone with gum and a paperclip.” She then noted how complicated repair questions have become, and that the purpose of the workshop was to assess the dynamics of the repair market in light of the bedrock principle of the Federal Trade Commission: robust competition provides the greatest benefits for the consumer.
In advance of the workshop, FTC staff had issued ten “questions for inquiry,” seeking to discover (1) the prevalence of certain types of repair restrictions, (2) whether consumers understand the existence and the effects of repair restrictions, (3) the effect of repair restrictions on the repair market in the United States, and (4) the impact that manufacturers’ repair restrictions have on small and local businesses. The workshop drew participants from a wide range of fields, who shared their perspectives with the commission and the public. Among them:
•The CEO of a Minnesota company that resells large digital devices. When a manufacturer refuses to provide aftermarket support, she pointed out, the sale dies, the customer is angry, and the equipment goes to the landfill.
•A Vermont independent repair shop owner, seven years out of college, whose business is increasingly stymied by devices that are “completely sealed, batteries glued in.” At stake, she said, is a whole sector of small business. Her biggest concern: “What will technology cost in ten years, and who will be left behind?”
•A federal safety and risk management expert who believes we are in a “fourth industrial age, the exponential age,” in which “dumb metal boxes” are long gone and we are “balancing cost, complexity, sustainability, and life-cycle management.” The question is: “Who should repair what, and when?” His answer: “It depends.”
•An automotive manufacturer’s association rep who helped craft the 2012 Massachusetts Memorandum of Understanding between carmakers and the trade groups representing independent auto repair shops. He said, “Dealer-only repairs? We’ve rejected this argument as a society.”
•A rep from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, who raised safety issues related to DIY repair, cautioned that insurance rates might rise, and reminded everyone that Right to Repair laws have yet to be adopted in a single state. She was chastened, however, by a state senator from Vermont, who cited research indicating that appliances that used to last thirty years now last an average of thirteen, and who noted that legislation is being drafted carefully in order to withstand anticipated legal challenges.
•A Republican state senator from Minnesota who was the lead sponsor of Right to Repair legislation in his state, who affirmed, “Consumers are demanding this, and I say to the corporate interests here in the room: ‘No’ is not going to work. There will be legislation in my state, with or without you.”
Every day in the United States, more than 416,000 smart-phones are disposed of.
— Environmental Protection Agency
THE LONELY MAYTAG REPAIRMAN
In 1967, the Maytag Corporation of Newton, Iowa, introduced a character in its television commercials that has become a cherished part of Americana. “Ol’ Lonely” was played memorably by actor Jesse White as a good-hearted Maytag repairman who simply didn’t have much work to do — all because of the remarkable quality of the machines he was trained to service. The first black-and-white, thirty-second ad, titled “Drill Instructor,” is an acknowledged advertising classic. Here we see Ol’ Lonely address his new Maytag recruits in a tough voice. “I’m gonna give it to you straight,” he says — although you can tell right away that he’s really a softie. Pointing to the “rugged motor” and “almost indestructible pump” inside a Maytag washing machine, he tells his repair recruits that in fact they’ll spend most of their time waiting for a service call that never comes. That’s when he picks up a small toolbox: the Maytag survival kit, filled with playing cards, crossword puzzles, and beadwork to fill their lonely hours. When actor Gordon Jump took over the role in 1987, Maytag’s sales pitch still centered on dependability, promising that the consumer washers and dryers were “built to last longer and need fewer repairs.” In an era of stiff competition, Maytag rose to number three among appliance manufacturers. Then, in 2006, the Whirlpool Corporation bought both Maytag and KitchenAid. Maytag commercials changed, and so did the product. In 2007, Whirlpool held a nationwide search for an actor to play its new repairman, seeking a “more relevant look and contemporary feel” for the character. By 2014, the repairman was handsome, wore tailored blues, and through animation-assisted actions, performed the same tasks as the machine he represented, with the emphasis now focused squarely on efficiency and convenience.
The nostalgia we may feel now for Ol’ Lonely is not for a simpler time but for appliances that once had a life expectancy of longer than the six, eight, or perhaps ten years estimated for many of today’s washing machines, clothes dryers, dishwashers, and refrigerators, which often need a repairman within the first two or three years.
I Fix, You Fix, We Fix
Peter Mui of Fixit Clinics and Kyle Wiens of iFixit, both based in California, have partnered to strategize ways to pressure for this kind of fundamental change. Their emphasis is less on community repair and more on ways to significantly increase the number of people with the knowledge required to make repairs. “How do you change the material economy of the world?” Kyle asks. “How do we get everyone thinking about this in a serious way?” Peter answers:
Once people start repairing, they start asking questions like “What went wrong?,” “Can it be fixed?,” and “How might it have been designed differently to avoid breaking in the first place?” That last question is where we’re ultimately going with Fixit Clinic: to encourage products designed with maintenance, serviceability, and repairability in mind. As consumers, we’re going to have to start demanding those things; at Fixit Clinic we trust that improvements in product quality and durability will come through a broader understanding and dialogue around how things are made now.
Any plan to build a vibrant repair economy will require product access and information. In 2003, iFixit set out to build the community of fixers by enlisting them to the cause. First, iFixit issued a call to action to product users and tech geeks everywhere: to do a “teardown,” that is, to get inside any product, take it apart step-by-step, and document in words and pictures how they did it. “Our goal,” Kyle says, “is to hijack the new product release cycle and get people thinking about product longevity from day one.”
New product releases are like catnip to tech hotshots around the world, and they compete for bragging rights to be the first to get inside every significant new product and report on what they find. It’s the kind of fervor that has accompanied the automotive industry for generations, but these are digital rights activists fixed on blowing the whistle on designs that shut out users and make tech less repairable. The iFixit team has deep experience, and when they announce their newest teardown on Twitter, along with their repairability score, it is definitive.
From the start, Kyle’s call to action was basically “Teach others.” Find a problem, figure out how to fix it, and write a repair guide to explain it. The self-described goal was to create a “free guide to fixing everything, written by everyone.” The results fall anywhere between a heavily illustrated blog post and a technical manual, and iFixit Repair Guides are now arguably the most reliable single source of product-specific repair information. The world of YouTube how-to videos has exploded also, and all these various online sites have created a global repair community and an invaluable resource for community repairers.
The scale of these resources is impressive. On iFixit.com you can search more than fifty-nine thousand Repair Guides, covering more than twenty-one thousand devices (within any device there are multiple repairs that might be needed), and hundreds of brands in every digital and electronic product category, including a growing number of appliances, car and truck models, and, more recently, an apparel category from zipper jackets to eyeglasses. iFixit.com will also sell you parts and tools, including those “funny screwdrivers” and a very useful tool called a “spudger” that is used for separating pressure-fit plastic components without damaging them.
Because the guides are the result of bona fide reverse engineering and the instructions are produced by iFixit and not the manufacturer, iFixit hasn’t accessed or published proprietary information. All of the guides are made available under the open source Creative Commons license, and the site is wiki-based to allow crowdsourced content editing. As a creator or user of the guides, you can share, copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you can adapt it — remix, transform, or build on it, and form collaborative teams. iFixit’s Tech Writing Project has been adopted by more than eighty schools and colleges. “Getting students to think about the longevity of products is a sea change,” says Marty Rippens, who’s running the program. The site also highlights professionals who can do the job for you; iFixit champions the act of repair as a job creator.
All of this sharing of repair know-how represents a full-on challenge to the hegemony of the technology companies. The point is to fill what Kyle calls “the ecosystem hole” that the companies have dug by manufacturing millions of devices without any end-of-life maintenance and disposal strategy. “I think of ourselves as an operating system to the repair world,” he says, “providing information, knowledge, and tools to help make it possible for you to go out and do the repairs. But we’re not the ones turning the screwdriver. You are.”
You will find a user’s guide to navigating the world of online repair resources in appendix 1.
Building a Repair Economy
Repair and maintenance will make its way back into the fabric of everyday life only when professional repair is reestablished as a viable and attractive career path. Reclaiming repair as a profession is critical to establishing a repair economy. An important advantage is that repair is predominantly local — recalling one of Neil Seldman’s axioms for resource management: localize the industry; nothing should travel far.
The proliferation of main street computer and digital device repair businesses and the appearance of smartphone repair kiosks in every mall in the nation have been steadily growing this segment of the market. Apple’s initiative with Best Buy to provide the kind of repair you could previously find only at the few-and-far-between Apple Stores, Motorola’s partnering with iFixit to provide repair kits for its phones, and HP’s posting step-by-step repair videos to its YouTube channel are all significant moves to scale at the corporate level. The emphasis on electronic products is justified — the electronics industry is in a hot competition with the garment industry to be the fastest growing waste stream. But the real potential for an economic shot in the arm lies in developing a thriving repair sector that offers a much broader menu of repairs.
In Portland, Oregon, an organization called Portland Repair Finder is providing a central resource that links people to repairs. Its mission might be a model for every city and county: “Dedicated to helping more people fix more things. We make tools, knowledge, and resources easier to find, and help tell the stories behind repair work.” The Portland Repair Finder locator map shows the wide range of repair businesses and nonprofits in their orbit.
In New York City, Sandra Goldmark and a group of backstage theatre artisans founded Fixup in 2013 to help rebuild the repair economy. How exactly? By creating pop-up repair shops that provide work for professionals of all stripes. By creating an apprenticeship program. By holding workshops to build excitement around repair. Fixup repairs are not free but they are reasonable — their website has their pricing. In 2018 they expanded to develop “Good Stuff” — a retail experience that combines repair, reuse, and smart, sustainable design all in one space. “This is the future of stuff!” they proudly proclaim. If repair is to be a first option in the “hierarchy of remedies,” then this is the kind of collaborative repair culture communities need.
The Open Repair Alliance
The open-source repair culture represented by iFixit and others is a growing global phenomenon. In 2017, the environmental ministers of the member states of the European Union approved a set of recommendations, called the Ecodesign Directive, to increase the “resource efficiency” of mainstream appliances: lighting, televisions, washing machines, dishwashers, and refrigerators. The document begins with the observation that 80 percent of the environmental impacts made by products are determined at the design stage. “Europe’s ‘take-make-use-throw’ economy is costing consumers money and depleting the world of finite resources. Better product policy can help Europe transition towards a circular economy, where waste is prevented and products are designed to be reused or recycled.”
Repair culture is in the thick of this push. In 2018, five organizations joined together to form the international Open Repair Alliance, challenging the common definition of prosperity as purely economic. Their members include the Repair Café International Foundation, based in Amsterdam; iFixit and Fixit Clinics in the United States; the Germany-based Anstiftung Foundation, which coordinates a network of seven hundred Repair Cafes and brings a strong focus on repair in education; and Restart, based in London and active throughout the UK and Europe (its motto is “Don’t despair, just repair”).
In late 2018, the European Commission considerably weakened the proposals of the Ecodesign Directive, and critics easily demonstrated that the revisions mirrored the language and interests of industry. In response, Restart, Repair Cafe, and iFixit activists drafted the Manchester Declaration. “We are part of a growing movement pushing for our Right to Repair worldwide,” the document asserted, “alongside independent repair businesses and citizens frustrated with the early obsolescence of most of today’s products.”
In October 2019, a substantial and somewhat surprising breakthrough was achieved that seemed to respond to those demands directly. The European Commission approved new rules for appliance manufacturers that were, as the BBC reported, “prompted by complaints from consumers across Europe and North America infuriated by machines that break down when they are just out of warranty.” New standards will take effect in 2021 requiring appliance makers to extend the life expectancy of lighting fixtures, washing machines, dishwashers, and refrigerators, and to provide spare parts for up to ten years. One important aspect of the legislation falls short, however: companies can limit consumers’ access to parts and remove consumer-repaired products from warranty. Stephane Arditi of the European Environment Bureau told the BBC: “When repair activities stay in the hands of a few firms, we’re missing an opportunity to make it more affordable and readily available. Small independent repairers can make a great contribution to the economy and our society. We need to help them do their job.”
Individual European countries are adopting other kinds of repair-friendly policy initiatives too. These include Sweden’s tax breaks on repairs, to nudge consumers to take a second look before throwing things away, and France’s proposed product sticker requirement, which, in addition to energy use, would provide both the estimated life expectancy of appliances and electronics and a one-to-ten rating for repairability. The direction this is heading is to make planned obsolescence flat-out illegal, but the hope is that the market itself will provide that incentive.
A key strategy in lobbying for these kinds of policies is collecting information that sustainability organizations can use to pressure manufacturers to develop better designed, more resource-efficient products. To this end, the Repair Café Foundation created a first-of-its-kind platform called RepairMonitor. Restart in the UK has developed their Fixometer. The Open Repair Alliance is establishing an “open standard” to make it easy to collect and share data on electronics repair among many different groups. By collectively analyzing this information, the alliance will be able to extract insights to strengthen the push for repair.
Is this broadening coalition merely another social movement that will come and go in the long arc of history? Governments are responding slowly to the profound changes reported by climate scientists around the world. We don’t know how the dynamics of extreme weather events, for example, will force entrenched industries to transition to a postcarbon economy, but we are seeing rapidly growing political pressure for climate action from the younger generations. Those who identify with the repair movement see the repair mindset, the right to repair, and all that they imply for consumer and cultural behaviors as vital to the transition. Isn’t this the nondystopian future we all hope for, in which civilization has learned from its mistakes?
Whether your motivation is to take control of your stuff, satisfy your curiosity, show off what you know, find something to do with your hands, find something to do for your neighbors, stick it to the big corporations, push back against obscene consumerism and waste, or draw down the carbon in our atmosphere and oceans — your town can have a community repair project too.