Public frustration at short-lived, irreparable products and growing awareness about the environmental impacts of over-consumption highlight Aotearoa's need for 'right to repair' legislation. Sarah Pritchett, Hannah Blumhardt, Graeme Austin and Paul Smith make the case.
Having the 'right to repair' the products we own is a hot topic globally and in Aotearoa New Zealand. A petition from Repair Café Aotearoa NZ (RCANZ) calling on the Minister for the Environment to introduce right to repair legislation has been delivered to Parliament, and Consumer NZ has built repairability and durability into the criteria they assess products against.
But how did we get to the point where repairing stuff has become so difficult and expensive, and why is it worth fighting to get our right to repair back again?
What happened to the No 8 wire approach?
“...repair restrictions limit consumers’ autonomy to fix and tinker with their goods as they see fit. This not only suppresses exploration, innovation, and self-reliance, but also undermines common understandings of ownership.” Daniel A Hanley, et al, 2020
New Zealanders are proud of their ‘No 8 wire’ attitude - that practical and resilient can-do approach to creating or repairing using scrap materials and lateral problem-solving. Historically, this resourcefulness was necessary because of Aotearoa’s distance from other countries and because, up until the mid-1980s, protectionist economic policies made overseas products and spare parts prohibitively expensive.
Since then, however, New Zealanders’ ability to apply that Number 8 wire approach to digital devices, in particular, has been greatly restricted by market deregulation, global product supply chains, declining costs of manufacture, the complexity of digital products, and business models based on individual ownership and continual replacement.
Today, manufacturers’ strategies of planned obsolescence actively encourage replacement over repair in order to drive more product sales. Such strategies include frequent product upgrades, withholding spare parts, gluing batteries in place, requiring proprietary tools for undertaking repairs, or programming software so that it restricts repairs to authorised dealers or doesn’t update on older models.
Repairing is further hampered by the fact that the majority of New Zealand’s electronic goods are manufactured overseas by foreign-owned companies. Importers and distributors generally don’t have the capability to repair the goods or import spare parts at a scale that works economically. Furthermore, consumers have limited ability to engage directly with manufacturers to troubleshoot issues or give feedback about design flaws. Repair queries are also often referred to overseas branches, which makes it increasingly difficult to find information about repair, let alone actually get it done.
This globalised context makes it harder for individual governments to use policy to influence multinational corporations and overseas manufacturers away from strategies like planned obsolescence. It’s no surprise, then, that consumers are frustrated as repairing their goods becomes increasingly difficult and expensive.
Repair it or junk it?
A Consumer NZ survey of 5000 participants conducted between June 2020 and June 2021 reported that only 24 percent of Kiwis would rather replace a faulty appliance or device than get it repaired, while 49 percent felt bad about junking it. However, finding a repairer and spare parts for a reasonable cost are barriers to getting items repaired:
- Under half (45 percent) of respondents reported it easy to find someone to fix an appliance or device
- Only 24 percent of respondents thought it was easy to find spare parts
- 66 percent of respondents thought that repairing goods cost too much.
Consumer NZ also surveyed 3337 mobile phone owners in December 2020 and found that most of the common faults related to the battery or screen. Although these should be relatively easy and inexpensive to fix, and owners wanted to fix them, most weren’t getting repaired. The survey showed that:
- 84 percent of respondents expected at least some of a phone’s faults to be repairable
- 66 percent of phone faults were reported as a battery or charging problem
- 15 percent of phone faults were broken screens, and only 43 percent of these screens were repaired
- While 73 percent of failed batteries were fixed, 35 percent of owners reporting reduced battery capacity were less likely to seek repair.
This difficulty in getting electronic items repaired has very real environmental and social consequences.
Why should we care about repair?
E-waste is the world’s fastest growing waste stream, and New Zealand’s per capita e-waste footprint is already 20.1kg per year. The pace at which we consume and discard electronics is fuelled by cheap products that aren’t designed to last. This global appetite for electronic products increases demand for critical raw materials - many of which aren’t renewable or substitutable. Their extraction often carries serious environmental and ethical implications. To make matters worse, they are generally not recovered from discarded products for recycling into new products.
Indeed, while recycling may seem to be the solution, only 17.4 percent of the 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste produced globally each year is recycled. New Zealand’s e-recycling rate is potentially as low as 2 percent. Not only are we losing valuable resources, we’re sending huge quantities of e-waste to landfill, risking public health and environmental harm from the toxic chemicals and components now discarded into the whenua.
While there’s no doubt we should improve recycling efforts, extending product lifespans is absolutely critical as it slows material extraction, consumption and waste generation in the first place. Repairing a product retains much more of its embedded value, whereas it is estimated that recycling retains only one-quarter of that value. This reality has long motivated advocates of Right to Repair, as noted by the grassroots, UK-based social enterprise, The Restart Project:
“Every time we extend a gadget’s lifetime, we space out and slow the impacts of manufacture. The fewer new items we buy, the more we limit greenhouse gas emissions, save water and avoid using minerals that are hard to mine and harder to recycle”
Where to with right to repair?
Public frustration at short-lived, irreparable products, alongside growing awareness about the environmental and ethical implications of overconsumption and waste, have spurred community and legislative efforts to restore consumers’ right to repair. While internationally there are specific laws that specify a right to repair for vehicles - such as the 2012 Massachusetts H4362, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Amendment (Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme) Act 2021) - there is no precedent for an all-encompassing piece of legislation that covers all aspects of right to repair.
In Aotearoa, enshrining this right will require changes to consumer, intellectual property, and waste minimisation legislation to remove existing barriers to repair. It will also require introducing greater manufacturer responsibility to make repair the norm rather than the exception, and the opening up of new opportunities to encourage or require better product design for repairability and durability.
There is also a need to consider economic measures that will help make product repair more available, accessible and affordable. Such measures might include incentives and tax rebates for repaired products and repair activities, and local and central government support for repair apprenticeships and non-profit repair hubs.
For more on the law and policy reforms that could help to encourage repair in Aotearoa, see Graeme Austin, Hannah Blumhardt, Sarah Pritchett and Paul Smith (2022) “My Product, My Right to Repair It/Taku Hua, Taku Motika ki te Tapi" in More Zeros and Ones Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand Edited by Anna Prendergast and Kelly Prendergast, Bridget Williams Books: Wellington https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/more-zeros-and-ones/
