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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: 4, Insightful) by kazzie on Saturday March 14 2020, @09:14AM (2 children)
Encouraging people to repair hardware and keep using it for more than two years is all well and good, but if the manufacturers / carriers stop offering security patches for the software, we've still got a problem.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Saturday March 14 2020, @12:07PM
Galaxy S2 is finally getting mainline Linux support, 9 years after release. Tiny ripples with Purism and Pine64 on the horizon too. Less faith in corporations, more in community 'open' hardware projects.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday March 15 2020, @02:23AM
Then "unlocked bootloader" needs to be part of the definition of "repairable".
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.