Right to Repair for the Business World

In March 2023, I attended a briefing on the European Commission’s legislative proposal for consumers’ Right to Repair. This proposal is part of the European Green Deal package, which also includes the Ecodesign Directive and Circular Economy Action Plan. The idea is to prolong product life, and in doing so reduce e-waste, decrease strain on natural resources, and decouple economic growth from environmental harm. There are similar calls for Right to Repair legislation at state and federal level in the US, most recently with 28 attorneys general sending a letter to congress in late March. 

Drivers for change

The production of IT hardware comes with significant environmental risks, which include pollution, effects on human health and quality of life and carbon emissions. Electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream on the planet, predicted to reach 74 million tonnes per year by 2030 according to the United Nations Global Ewaste Monitor. Supply chains are an issue given where some of the materials are mined and the risks associated with those areas. Electronics also contain a significant amount of Critical Raw Materials (CRM) that are in rare or politically unstable supply. 

There is also significant environmental and economic opportunity in repairs. A 2021 report from Green Alliance found “that transforming the UK’s approach to repair, reuse, recycling and remanufacture could create more than 450,000 jobs across the country by 2035”. One UN report states that Remanufacturing and comprehensive refurbishment help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 79% - 99% in some sectors; comprehensive refurbishing saves 82%- 99% raw material requirement compared to new production; refurbishment results in 69% - 85% less energy use and related emissions compared to the linear process of take, make, waste. 

Implications for the market

There seems to be a ground swell of public support for refurbished electronic goods, and we are seeing them in the mainstream as a result. Consumers have been able to buy refurbished mobile phones for some time, some of which have been recertified by the manufacturer. We are now seeing major mobile phone service providers like 02 offer contracts on refurbished phones. 

Laptops, tablets and PCs from companies like Techbuyer are now available on dedicated second-user marketplaces like Backmarket, Ebay, Amazon and New Egg. Public sector organisations are building refurbished into their procurement plans. It is now law in the UK and other European countries that a percentage of public sector IT purchases be refurbished products. Many major resellers are having to incorporate a strong refurbishment component as a result. 

The legislative proposal from the EU takes the idea of product life extension further by pushing manufacturers to repair rather than replace during the first two years of the product’s lifetime (unless this is prohibitively expensive). The proposal would also make refusal to repair illegal. There are plans for online repairs platforms in each member country, which match customers with businesses offering repair and refurbishment services.  

The proposal also puts forward a standardised EU repairs information form, to include price, conditions of service, timeframe, and use of another product whilst the repair is being carried out.  Companies like Techbuyer, that already process and sell secondary equipment, would be able to showcase and compete at a pan European level in a framework designed by government. However, the proposed legislation stops short of integrating the B2B market into the right to repair.   

What is missing? 

This Right to Repair legislation relates to the consumer market, which is around 37% of overall IT spend. It has been criticised for missing most of the impact. However, developing the right to repair on business equipment contains a range of different challenges. It touches on software support and upgrades, which are necessary to extending product life. Contractual arrangements also come into play. Software and hardware are often bundled together in the business world, and preferential rates can be given on longer term contracts. 

There is also a growing trend in the server market towards long-term leasing over product sales. Described as “performance-as-a-service”, “platform-as-a-service” or “software-as-a-service”, IT hardware remains the property of the manufacturer and is managed by them. Upgrades and extra provisioning are built into a service plan rather than the end user having ownership of the assets. A good example of this is HP’s Greenlake, which Techbuyer offers as a service for customers who would like to establish an on-premise private cloud. It serves a particular customer segment that is separate from organisations who want to buy and managed their own servers or migrate all workloads to the cloud.   

Extending product life on entire estates is often more complex than extending product life on consumer devices. It requires an understanding of software, hardware and maintenance and an ability to integrate them all into an IT Asset Management Plan. Some customers will have the in-house expertise to manage some of this and are happy with having contractors manage the rest. Other customers will be more comfortable out-sourcing everything to an as-a-service provider. The key is to have choice and then build this choice into legislation that supports circular economy.  

What is next?

Building more sustainable approaches to IT provision is long-term project that has multiple moving parts. In the EU, the review of the Ecodesign Directive review is now underway and much more focused on enterprise IT. Lot 9 specifically relates to servers. The EU Commission is discussing how to optimise energy efficiency with stakeholders like Techbuyer and Interact. Ideas on energy saving include rules on BIOS settings and a standardised server energy efficiency grading. Consideration is being given to extending the materials list of servers and their components in order to support better recycling in the future. There is also discussion around including networking as a distinct product category. 

It is unclear what the outcome of all these discussions will be. However, Techbuyer and its partners will be working hard on the best outcome.