A new "right to repair" law will come into effect this Summer, requiring manufacturers to make spare parts available for electrical goods.
Have you ever had a piece of equipment in your home break down and then find out that replacement parts are not available? We've all had to replace some piece of kit that should have been repairable, and it's become a serious problem not just for consumers but also the environment. Landfills are rapidly filling up with tech waste that wouldn't be as necessary if items were more easily able to be repaired.
Part of the problem with repairing tech is that it's often designed specifically so that we can't repair it in order to encourage sales of new equipment. The Agri-Tech industry is a great industrial example of this, where vehicle owners are having to hack their own vehicles' software in order to correct problems the manufacturers don't want to solve.
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A new law is set to come into force this summer that should help fight against planned tech obsolescence. The "right to repair" law will require manufacturers of electrical products to offer spare parts to customers so that they can repair their own faulty tech, or at least so that the manufacturer can't deny them the parts to attempt a repair.
The change is expected to raise the lifetime of many electronic goods by as much as ten years, improving energy efficiency of products and reducing the tech waste sent to landfill. Manufacturers' total carbon footprints will also be reduced as a great deal of energy is used to create new items in the first place.
Source: BBC News
