Eindhoven: In a Dutch city built on electronics, the workshops that fix rather than replace have watched the throwaway economy hollow them out for a generation. A cluster of European rules now moving into force is meant to tilt the balance back, and the most consequential deadline arrives at the end of July.
The Right to Repair Directive must be written into national law by 31 July, and its effects reach beyond the fine print. Manufacturers of a defined set of products, among them washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and smartphones, will be obliged to carry out repairs on request, even for items bought before the deadline, and a repair undertaken during the warranty period will extend that warranty by a further year. The intent is to make repair the default choice rather than an act of stubbornness, by removing the small frictions, unavailable parts, opaque pricing, discontinued models, that nudge consumers toward buying new.
The directive does not stand alone. It dovetails with the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the Union’s broader attempt to design waste out of the economy at the drawing-board stage. Since last year smartphones and tablets sold in the Union have carried repairability labels graded from A to E, spare parts must remain available for seven years, and batteries must survive hundreds of charge cycles. The Commission has signalled it intends to widen that logic to furniture, textiles, tyres and mattresses, extending the reach of durability requirements into corners of the consumer economy that have escaped them.
Still to come is the Circular Economy Act, expected as a legislative proposal later in 2026, which aims at a problem the repair rules only touch. Europe recycles a modest share of the materials it consumes, and much of what it does recover is too low in quality to displace virgin resources. The Act is meant to build a genuine single market for secondary raw materials, standardising quality and stimulating demand so that recycled content becomes a commodity firms actively seek rather than tolerate. Its supporters frame it as an industrial-strategy measure as much as an environmental one, a way to blunt the Union’s dependence on imported metals and minerals.
The obstacles are practical and stubborn. Repair is labour-intensive in a region where labour is expensive, and the economics often favour replacement even when the rules do not. Manufacturers warn that mandatory repair obligations and long spare-part guarantees raise costs that ultimately reach the shelf price. Repair advocates reply that those costs are simply the true price of goods that were previously designed to be discarded, and that a mature repair sector could create durable local employment of exactly the kind automation has eroded.
Whether the July deadline changes behaviour or merely paperwork will depend on enforcement, and on whether consumers presented with a genuine choice actually take it. In workshops like those around Eindhoven, the hope is modest but real: that fixing a thing might once again be easier than throwing it away.
