Right to repair act is not enough
By: Alexandra Groza
Tags: Right To Repair, Carbon Footprint, Regulation, Ewaste Recycling, Maintenance

In any argument, if people cannot agree on the same foundation, no progress can be made.

During my high school and college years, I used to transcribe in electronic format books for teachers in the university in various technical fields, such as chemistry, physics, medicine and mechanics, which made me a sort of a technical editor. I did it because I was and still am a perfectionist and I understood that I could do it cheaper and most of times better than alternatives, because I was one person doing the whole job and the text went from my computer straight to printing press with no other checking. For me it was a somewhat good sorce of income, considering that we were still struggling with the transition from communism to a fake capitalism. Why we still have a fake capitalism is subject for another discussion. One book in particular impressed, a book written by a mechanics engineer teacher about maintenance, in which he was already complaining of the lack of interest for maintenance, which eventually inflates costs and drives a society into consumerism, on the back of mother nature, which we are far from being able to subdue to our will.

Twenty-five years later, I am even more disgusted of the way humanity treats this subject and I see people like Louis Rossmann struggling to patch up a system which cannot be changed by advocating for the right to repair act, like he did here.

It has been an honor for me to be part of a workshop for sustainability at the European Dialogue on Internet Governance in June 2017 in Tallinn. I didn’t physically participate unfortunately, because I was going through a tough time, but I hope that some of my ideas changed at least some people’s minds.

Now I am not sure if Louis knew that right to repair act is not enough or he recently realized when he said this, but I realized it back in 2017 when, while trying to tackle e-waste problem, I hit the great wall of capitalism and the principle of non-interference in private businesses via regulations.

But who are we kidding here!? Businesses and politics mingle in any political system so good, especially when passing a certain profit threshold, that it turns the non-interference idea into some sort of propaganda. What is that threshold, you ask? I suppose it is that moment in the evolution of a company, when close to no amount of individual effort can beat an army of top-notch lawyers, making them untouchable, like some mini-gods in which we can only trust they have the best intentions. The only problem is that they don’t, most of them. Their intention is profit while consumer’s intention is usability.

We brag ourselves as a civilization that we arrived at a point where more than half of the planet can afford a phone and access to information. but we have failed miserably in teaching people what should be the lifetime of a product and how to maintain it.

In that workshop I mentioned about, one of my ideas was that, either companies who manufacture the parts for, let’s say a phone, or the company selling the phone, to be constrained to sell them to repair shops, close to the acquisition price the brand got it. It doesn’t help the consumer that much, when he bought a refrigerator with 500$, but the repair shop charges him decently on labor done, but the price for components raises the total cost close to the price of a new one. Of course, the consumer will say that it is better to buy a new one.

But hey…you might say, how can you impose such a regulation for companies, communism, blabla. And this is the moment when we go back to my first phrase. In the discussion about e-waste, sustainability and respect for the consumer, if we don’t agree on a common foundation, no progress will ever be made. And that foundation is the preservation of our environment so we can live in it, because if we destroy it, we are a suicidal race. We are yet to wait for a carbon footprint tax, which would incentivize my proposal, because if a company like Apple, Samsung or even Tesla will force its customers to appeal only to them when one of their products is broken, then they would be forced to return the carbon footprint tax to the consumer.

Of course, my idea would drive prices up but would force companies to build them better and easier to repair. Many people fail to understand, regardless of reasons, that many products we have in our lives could last a lot longer than they do. Quick example. I recently tried to open and clean my vacuum cleaner, because it’s a quite simple device which can work for many years, just to find out that the motor was factory crimped in such a way that it made it impossible to be opened, cleaned, and put some oil in the ball bearings. Therefore, as that oil will run out, the bearing balls will start to grind each other and their metal encasement, until vibrations will physically destroy the motor and I will be forced to throw it away. So instead of me buying two vacuum cleaners on a timeline of let’s say 10 years, if properly built and regulated, I could maintain it even longer than that for a higher purchasing price.

And Louis is right that people do not demand it, thus it will never be implemented. How did we get here, I will not go into suppositions which might turn me into a conspiracy theorist, but I am certain that if our culture will not put an emphasis on maintenance and environment, as a foundation for everything we build, then we are doomed to go towards some dystopian future which will crumble fast when the fight for resources will drive even more corruption and less respect for life.

We are definitely not going in a good direction, seeing how things tend to progress. Products tend to last less and less, prices go down, but it is all because we only claim to care for the environment, like during the Greta Thunberg madness, but we do not understand that the change must be a lot more profound and debates must agree on a common ground which is our species survival. We are still caught in ideological fights, which were built on ideas at least decades old when we did not face the same global problems we do now. It is the same situation as with religions, reason why I put them in the same basket. When an idea cannot be challenged on claims of doctrine, then any debate is futile.