‘ Right to repair’ gaining ground

If you buy a product — a car, a smartphone, or even a tractor — and it breaks, should it be easier for you to fix it yourself?

Manufacturers of a wide range of products have made it increasingly difficult over the years to repair things, for instance by limiting availability of parts or by putting prohibitions on who gets to tinker with them. It affects not only game consoles or farm equipment, but cell phones, military gear, refrigerators, automobiles and even hospital

Game players have struggled with a problem that has plagued the Nintendo Switch detachable wireless controllers called Joy Cons for years.

ventilators, the lifesaving devices that have proved crucial this year in fighting the COVID19 pandemic.

Now, a movement known as “right to repair” is starting to make progress in pushing for laws that prohibit restrictions like these.

In August, Democrats introduced a bill in Congress to block manufacturers’ limits on medical devices, spurred by the pandemic. In Europe, the European Commission announced plans in March for new right-to-repair rules that would cover phones, tablets and laptops by

2021.

Massachusetts voters will consider a measure Tuesday that would make it easier for local garages to work on cars. And in more than 20 statehouses nationwide, righttorepair legislation has been introduced in recent years by both Republicans and Democrats.

Over the summer, the House advanced a funding bill that includes a requirement that the Federal Trade Commission complete a report on anticompetitive practices in the repair market and present its findings to Congress and the public. And in a letter to the FTC, Marine Capt. Elle Ekman and former Marine Lucas Kunce last year detailed how mechanics in the U. S. armed forces have run into similar obstacles.

The goal of righttorepair rules, advocates say, is to require companies to make their parts, tools and information available to consumers and repair shops in order to keep devices from ending up in the scrap heap. They argue that the rules restrict people’s use of devices that they own and encourage a throwaway culture by making repairs too difficult.

They also argue that it’s part of a culture of planned obsolescence — the idea that products are designed to be shortlived in order to encourage people to buy more stuff. That contributes to wasted natural resources and energy use at a time when climate change requires movement in the opposite direction to rein in planetwarming emissions.

Manufacturing a new device or appliance is still largely reliant on polluting sources of energy — electricity generated from burning fossil fuels, for instance — and constitutes the largest environmental impact for most products. Mining and manufacturing materials for the newest iPhone, for example, represents roughly 83% of its contribution to the heattrapping emissions in the atmosphere throughout its life cycle, according to Apple’s manufacturing data. For a washing machine, it’s about 57%.

Add to that complex calculus the emissions from assembling the materials into a product, and then shipping it around the world.

“There are a lot of products that are not designed to last,” said Gay Gordon Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association, a group focused on right-to-repair legislation. “But if you have enough options for repair, you can keep even the worst product going, if you can fix it.”

Manufacturers argue that their products are repairable, and that they are protecting consumers’ safety, privacy and security by restricting who does the repairs. Apple, for instance, limits consumers from repairing their devices by requiring specific tools or authorized parts.

“When a repair is needed, a customer should have confidence the repair is done right,” Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, said in a release last year. “We believe the safest and most reliable repair is one handled by a trained technician using genuine parts that have been properly engineered and rigorously tested.”

An Apple spokesperson this week pointed to the company’s efforts to expand its product repair programs: Last fall, the tech giant announced it will give independent repair businesses the same genuine parts, tools and diagnostics for iPhone repairs as it gives to Apple-authorized service providers.

Other companies argue that the computer code that drives the device remains the property of the manufacturer, not the consumer, which further limits the potential for thirdparty repair. Tractor manufacturer John Deere is one example, using license agreements with farmers that forbid them from even looking at the software running the tractor. Violating it could be considered breach of contract, which comes with the risk of a lawsuit.

Jen Hartmann, John Deere’s director of strategic public relations, said the company has “made an industry commitment along with several ag equipment manufacturers to provide a comprehensive tool kit of service tools available to help end users perform service and maintenance on their machinery.”

For Leticia Reynolds earlier this year, it was a safety issue of a different sort. As a medical equipment technician at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo., she was eager to get ventilators in service. The country faced a nationwide shortage of the lifesaving machines, which help desperately ill patients breathe.

But there were some that Reynolds couldn’t fix herself, because the manufacturer wouldn’t let her. Some ventilator makers are among those companies imposing rules prohibiting anyone but their own technicians from obtaining the tools, parts and instructions to make repairs.

“We’re 100% solely depending on the manufacturer,” she said, even for routine maintenance. But that can delay repairs, which can mean “equipment isn’t available for a patient that needs it.”

Over the past year or so, as much of the world was cooped up due to stayathome restrictions, sales of Nintendo’s Switch console have increased sharply. But players have been struggling with a problem that has plagued its detachable wireless controllers, called JoyCons, for years: Sometimes it thinks players are moving the controller, even if they aren’t.

That led to a classaction lawsuit claiming, among other things, that the company “routinely refuses to repair the joysticks without charge.” The case is now in arbitration, and since then, the company has begun fixing Joy-Con issues at no charge.

Still, the fight continues: Last month, a French consumer advocacy group filed a complaint alleging planned obsolescence, claiming Nintendo knew some controllers were failing too quickly.

Nintendo did not respond to a request for comment.

While these burdens on repair can make some gadgets seem unusable and, consequently, disposable, some argue that new repair mandates wouldn’t have a measurable effect on how often people replace their products.

“Common consumer devices such as laptops and smartphones are already widely reused and recycled without any type of new repair mandate,” said Walter Alcorn, vice president of environmental affairs at the Consumer Technology Association, an industry trade group that represents thousands of technology companies including Apple, Dell and Microsoft.

He said that CTA’s biennial survey showed that only 2% of consumers “report throwing their old mobile device in the trash while more than 10 times as many reported either trading in their old mobile device, selling it, giving it away, or recycling it.”

The idea of planned obsolescence isn’t new. It was written about in 1928 by Justus George Frederick, an American advertising expert who suggested that people would have to buy an everincreasing variety of things, then discard them and purchase new things, in order to help keep a consumer economy steaming along.

Since at least the early 1960s, critics have complained that planned obsolescence wastes people’s money, uses valuable resources and chokes landfills. Today, for example, there are more than 70 different elements in a modern smartphone — nearly twothirds of the periodic table in the palm of your hand.

Research suggests that consumer devices may be more shortlived than in the past. According to a study by a German sustainability research group, Öko-Institut, the proportion of major household appliances that died within five years rose from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2012. Though the analysis is now several years old, it found the trend in a wide spectrum of products, including TV sets and large electrical appliances as well as mobile phones.

Extending the life of a product even relatively briefly can have significant benefits, according to Nathan Proctor, who leads the right-to-repair campaign at the U. S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocacy group. If Americans would extend the life of their cell phones by one year, for instance, it would be the climatesaving equivalent of taking 636,000 cars off the road, or about the number of passenger vehicles registered in the state of New Mexico.

Manufacturers have considerable influence over the standards to which their products are made, said Mark Schaffer, a consultant on the life cycle of electronics. According to a 2017 report that he wrote, that’s because major manufacturers sit on the panels that set guidelines for things like environmental impact. As a result, he said, tougher standards can be difficult to achieve.

“As a whole, the industry needs to raise the floor on repairability,” Schaffer said. “That’s probably not going to happen until there is a legal requirement at a state or at a national level.”