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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: 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?