It was International Repair Day on Saturday, which means there was a lot of interesting comment about it over the weekend. Here’s something that caught my eye: supporting repair is really popular.
There’s a petition associated with this, so go and sign it. Let’s make sure that politicians of all stripes know that we want it. There can’t be that many policies that over 80% of people would support, so there’s every reason to grab hold of this and wrangle it into a manifesto before the election.
If said politicians want to know what it might look like practically, we don’t have to look far for good examples. France has picked up on repair in a big way over the last few years. As part of their circular economy bill in 2020, the country has adopted a range of new support measures to create a culture of repair, including these:
- Appliances and electronics get a repairability score displayed at the point of sale. From next year they will also have to display a durability score, so you can see how long things are likely to last.
- Manufacturers have to make spare parts available for a minimum of five years, and deliver them within 15 days.
- Manufacturers are banned from making devices that can’t be repaired, and planned obsolescence is illegal.
- Legal minimum guarantees have been introduced to give customers confidence, with a six month guarantee on repairs and a 12 month guarantee on secondhand goods.
- The ‘vouchers for repair’ mentioned above – yes, France has those too for shoes and clothes.
I’m not sure if France has no VAT on repairs, but others certainly do, including Sweden and Austria. Norway is making manufacturers offer a five year guarantee on new appliances, pushing them to make things more reliable. Many of these sorts of measures are going to be adopted across the EU in some form. Repairability is returning, and as the Restart survey shows, there’s a real appetite for it in the UK too. Who’s going to take it on?
The Earthbound Report 