Let New Yorkers repair their stuff
Your smartphone has a dirty secret, and no, it’s not how much time you spend playing Candy Crush. It’s the toll it takes on the climate to produce more than 1 billion devices like it every year.
Keeping our phones running longer, by fixing instead of dumping them, would reduce planet-warming carbon emissions and save consumers hundreds of dollars. The companies that make our smartphones, however, are doing everything they can to make fixing them nearly impossible, keep profits sky-high, and force small, momand-pop independent repair shops out of business. A bill I sponsor with Sen. Neil Breslin, D-delmar, could go a long way toward changing that.
Through mining, processing rare metals, and energy-intensive semiconductor manufacturing, your phone produced an estimated 120 pounds of carbon emissions. According to a recent report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, if Americans kept our phones for just one more year, “the emissions reductions would be equivalent to taking 636,000 cars off the road.”
Worse yet, 85 percent of ewaste in the United States is never recycled.
So why don’t we keep using our phones longer? Because the companies that make our phones are doing everything they can to stop us from maintaining them. Apple and Samsung, the two largest smartphone manufacturers, refuse to sell replacement batteries directly to consumers. Imagine the outrage if Ford sold cars that only last as long as their batteries or original set of tires. This intentional policy of planned obsolescence is contributing to the climate crisis and it’s time for a change.
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission released a compelling bipartisan report confirming that tech companies intentionally make it difficult and expensive to repair our devices, driving customers to purchase new ones instead of fixing the old. The FTC report confirms the obvious, that “given a choice between a low-cost repair and buying a new mobile phone, many consumers will opt for the low cost repair,” and not just for smartphones, but for computers, gaming consoles, laptops, and more.
After the FTC report was issued, Apple announced it would begin to release some necessary information and parts for repairs to independent repair shops. Despite this news, manufacturers still make it unnecessarily difficult to repair devices and equipment, including:
■ Claiming repairs are impossible or too expensive: Without fair competition from independent repair shops, as car dealers face in the auto repair market, manufacturers can exert monopoly-like power to limit the extent of repairs and drive up the costs. Apple’s repair service, for example, may not recover your data from a waterdamaged iphone, or it charges so much for a repair that it’s more economical to buy a brand new device.
■ Restricting access to repair information: When good repair documents are freely and easily available, consumers can fix their old smartphones or take them to a repair shop instead of buying new. Manufacturers have this information, yet decline to share it with their customers and independent repair shops. Right-to-repair advocates predict a startling 400-percent job growth in the repair business currently suppressed by repair monopolized products. Schools can begin to teach the tinkerers of today to become the innovators of tomorrow.
■ Restricting access to replacement parts: Manufacturers also frustrate repair by refusing to offer genuine replacement parts to customers or repair shops, as well as by restricting their suppliers from selling to anyone else. Without access to genuine replacement parts, repairers have to rely on third-party components or scavenged parts.
■ Restricting access to necessary software tools: Some manufacturers require the use of specialized software tools to diagnose problems or program new parts to work with a device. But these are not shared with independent repair shops. This can mean that even a well-repaired phone with genuine parts won’t work as expected. Simply replacing the screen on your iphone, for example, with a new screen from an identical iphone, may not work correctly unless the phone is checked by Apple’s special software tool.
As with most devices, however, these barriers to repair are fixable. In New York, my Fair Repair Act requires manufacturers to provide the same repair information, replacement parts, and hardware they already have to smartphone owners and independent repair shops. It would keep our smartphones running longer, reduce e-waste climate impact, fuel skilled work and small business growth and save New York families an average $400 every year they’d otherwise spend on new devices and exorbitant industry repair prices.
New York can lead the way on right-to-repair this year, and if it does, our pocketbooks, small businesses and environment will undoubtedly benefit.