“By taking this step, the European Parliament has sent a clear report: mandatory harmonized labeling indicating sustainability and tackling planned obsolescence at European Community level is the way forward.” – said rapporteur David Cormand, MEP from France.
The label that fights against planned obsolescence
Parliament’s vote calls on the Commission of the European Union to develop and introduce mandatory labeling on all consumer electronics products that provides the consumer with clear information on the estimated shelf life and repairability of a product before his shipment. I bought. In other words, it is a label that we can research on products that will give us a score indicating the durability of a product and whether it is easy to repair or not.
From next January, France will be the first country to launch this scale, which they called the repairability index of smartphones, laptops and certain other products, and Austria has also started to take action. by reducing taxes on repair services. of products.
Of course, you’ll have to be careful with this because with this scale, which goes from 1 to 10, some manufacturers could take the opportunity to do a positive marketing campaign for their products by falsifying these results (after all, can you imagine Apple selling their MacBooks with a score of 3 out of 10?) because no manufacturer will want to get negative publicity with this new law. Thus, certain scales and standards must be established (or even an entity that assigns these scores) so that this information cannot be falsified and used to mislead the user as a simple sales strategy.
How do you know if a product is easy to repair?
Whether or not a product is easy to repair is completely subjective. For example, for a hardware expert, it would be very easy to fix a computer with a failed power supply (replacing it with another one), but it can be a very tedious task for those who have no idea. . There are web pages like iFixit where they give an arbitrary score to products that analyze whether they are easy to repair or not, but these are always subjective scores.
The EU motion requires that a grade be awarded for the ease with which it is to repair a product; According to a recent survey in Europe, 77% of citizens would rather repair their devices than replace them with a new one, while 79% believe that manufacturers should be legally obliged to facilitate repair of digital devices or at least to facilitate replacement of digital devices. its spare parts.
We will have to wait and see how this process unfolds, which, a priori, should be good news for us as consumers because now we will know, even arbitrarily, if a product is easy to repair and we can also make up our minds. idea of its durability.
What do you think about that? Are you in favor of the inclusion of this label or do you think that manufacturers could use it as a marketing strategy?
