Eindhoven: For a generation, the European response to a broken appliance was quietly absurd. A dishwasher would fail a few months after its warranty lapsed, a repair would cost almost as much as a replacement, and the spare part would turn out to be unavailable or glued behind a panel no consumer could open. The throwaway logic was so familiar that it felt natural. Brussels is now betting that it was never natural at all, but the product of design choices that policy can change, and it is preparing to make that bet the centrepiece of its industrial strategy.
The vehicle is a planned Circular Economy Act, an effort to pull together the bloc’s growing tangle of repair, recycling, and ecodesign rules into something businesses can actually plan around. The pitch is unusual because it is framed less as an environmental measure than as a question of competitiveness. Europe imports the overwhelming majority of the raw materials its industry depends on, from lithium to rare earths to the metals inside every circuit board, and much of that comes from a handful of suppliers with the leverage that dominance brings. Keeping materials in use for longer, the argument runs, is not merely virtuous; it is a hedge against a world where access to inputs can no longer be taken for granted.
The groundwork is already visible. A right-to-repair regime has begun forcing manufacturers to make spare parts and repair information available, and to stop designing products that resist being opened. A broader ecodesign framework is being extended well beyond energy efficiency to cover durability, the recycled content of new goods, and the eventual fate of a product once a consumer is finished with it. The coming Act is meant to be the connective tissue, setting common standards so that a phone, a textile, or a battery designed in one member state faces the same expectations everywhere in the single market.
For a city like Eindhoven, long a centre of electronics and industrial design, the implications run deep. Building a product to be taken apart, refurbished, and fed back into production is a different engineering discipline from building one to be cheap and disposable, and it rewards exactly the kind of high-skill manufacturing that western Europe still has. Proponents see a chance to turn an environmental obligation into an industrial advantage, growing a repair and remanufacturing sector that, unlike raw extraction, creates jobs close to where people live.
The obstacles are equally clear. Circular goods often cost more to make, and a market trained for decades to expect rock-bottom prices may resist paying for longevity it cannot see on a shelf. Smaller manufacturers worry about the compliance burden of yet another layer of standards, and fear that the rules will be written around the capabilities of large incumbents. There is also the awkward reality that some of the cheapest disposable products arrive from outside the bloc, raising the perennial question of how Europe enforces its own ambitions at the border without simply pricing its consumers out of the goods they want.
Whether the Act delivers will depend on details not yet written: how strict the durability requirements are, whether recycled-content targets come with real teeth, and whether the financing exists to help industry retool. The temptation, as ever, will be to announce bold targets and leave the hard mechanics for later. But the underlying instinct, that the way out of dependence on distant suppliers runs partly through products that last, is a serious one. After years of treating waste as an afterthought, Europe is starting to treat it as an industrial input, and that reframing may prove more consequential than any single rule.
