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Europe Wants a 'Right to Repair' Smartphones and Gadgets
The European Union is seeking to help consumers fix or upgrade devices, rather than replace them, as part of a 30-year push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
LONDON — Hoping to replace that two-year-old smartphone in a few months? The European Union wants you to think twice about doing that.
The bloc announced an ambitious plan on Wednesday that would require manufacturers of electronic products, from smartphones to tumble driers, to offer more repairs, upgrades and ways to reuse existing goods, instead of encouraging consumers to buy new ones.
[ . . . ] "The linear growth model of 'take-make-use-discard' has reached its limits," Virginijus Sinkevicius, the union's environment commissioner, told reporters in Brussels as he presented the "Circular Economy Action Plan," which includes the "right to repair" initiative.
"We want to make sure that products placed on E.U. market are designed to last longer, to be easier to repair and upgrade, easier to recycle and easier to reuse," he added.
Hopefully this would put an end to the waste and cost associat... Look! Over there! A new Shiny!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 13 2020, @11:26PM (4 children)
Dear EU.
You have already given enough proof of the tech expertise of your staff when you forced websites worldwide to ask the user what cookies do they want instead of forcing the browsers to not track the user unless explicitly allowed.
Your right to repair will be another layer of bureaucracy for the producer, more cost for the consumer, and another bureaucratic entity for your nephews to occupy after they buy their degrees.
Try doing a simpler thing. Define a fucking PROTOCOL for repairable hardware (in one line it must resemble electronics in the late 70s), and heavily discount VAT and taxes for those who produce sell and repair that, and let the market do the rest. Note I don't say the free market, because that was already killed with the industrial revolution and the sociopolitical fallout.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 13 2020, @11:36PM
Ohhhh, I dunno. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If they can stop phone makers from soldering and supergluing the batteries into the phones, we'll be a lot further ahead. We have the right to repair, if only we insist on it. Tell the manufacturers to stuff their silly bullshit rules.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Friday March 13 2020, @11:47PM (2 children)
OTOH, the EU is why cellphones no longer require a special snowflake charger.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2020, @11:51PM (1 child)
They make special chargers for millennials?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 14 2020, @03:02AM
I remember when I got my first smartphone, it was some early form of RAZR back when before Android gained ground.
It's charger was at first glance a standard USB cable, but I realized that other USB cables wouldn't charge it. The sneaky fuckers had an integrated resistor into their proprietary cable, that the phone had to sense before charging, and they wanted $25 bucks for a new one. There are more difficult problems that splicing a resistor into a cable, but that was my first taste of the dick moves of Big Gadgetry.
How can Europeans be so smart and yet be so goddamn stupid with everything else?