The Directive on common rules promoting the repair of goods, also known as the Right to Repair Directive, was adopted on 13 June 2024 in line with the European Green Deal’s objective of sustainable consumption. Now the ball is in the court of the Member States who shall transpose the Directive into national rules and apply it from 31 July 2026.
The Commission’s proposal promised to respond to the crucial issues of the premature discard of products and of consumer access to and attitudes towards repair. However, the text that was eventually adopted by the European legislators, although significant on many grounds, does not quite meet the right-to-repair ambitions that would deliver a repair society and contribute to establishing a sustainable circular economy.
In this blog post, I discuss some of the main aspects of a right to repair that have been raised around the adoption of this Directive, what made it in the final text of the Directive, what didn’t and what remains unsettled.
A (limited) obligation to repair
A major step towards a right to repair could have come from Article 5 that establishes an ‘obligation to repair’ for manufacturers as long as repair is possible. This important caveat is combined with an even more restrictive limitation: the obligation only applies to products listed in the Directive’s Annex II, which currently includes 10 product groups (i.e. those for which reparability is regulated by ecodesign requirements or by the new Batteries Regulation). Thus, despite including some important product groups, not least mobile phones, the obligation far from translates into a general, reliable right to repair for consumers.
Nevertheless, this new repair obligation is a step into the right direction and we can expect that more products will make it into the Annex’s list as more ecodesign requirements on repair are adopted under the auspices of the new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. Moreover, the provision contains several conditions that would tend to reinforce the impact of the obligation for those products it covers, such as rules on reasonable prices, a ban on software practices that prevent independent repair and the right for consumers to choose their repairer.
The ambiguous reasonableness strikes back
The issue of affordability was not addressed in the Commission’s proposal, contradicting the hope of right-to-repair proponents. Indeed, beyond access to spare parts and repair information, a major barrier to mainstreaming repair is the cost. The final text includes this concern by requiring that the repair obligation is to be ‘carried out either free of charge or for a reasonable price’ (Article 5(2)(a)). Likewise, the Directive requires spare parts and tools to also be offered at a ‘reasonable price’ that does not deter repair (Article 5(4)). There is, however, no specifying of what ‘reasonable’ means, but merely Recital 16 in the preamble stating that ‘[the price] should be set in such a way that consumers are not intentionally deterred from benefitting from the manufacturers’ obligation to repair’.
If the Commission does not clarify what a reasonable price means in ensuing guidelines, it will fall solely on national courts to interpret it, incurring uncertainty and delaying the effectiveness of the provision.
Some recognition for independent and do-it-yourself repairers
Another recurring concern for the right-to-repair movement is that independent repairers are facing great barriers to accessing spare parts, tools and manuals, and consumers are deterred from seeking repairs outside the network of manufacturers-authorised repairers. Yet, independent or do-it-yourself repairs play a crucial role in expanding repair practices.
The Directive makes some significant – though still insufficient – concessions to independent repair advocates notably by prohibiting ‘contractual clauses, hardware or software techniques that impede the repair’ for those products covered by the repair obligation (Article 5(6)). Such practices, like part pairing that consists in parts having to be remotely paired again to a device after repair via software by the manufacturer, represent a great threat to independent repair. The Directive also prevents manufacturers from refusing to repair products covered by the repair obligation just because a previous repair has been performed by ‘non-authorised’ repairers.
The requirement that manufacturers ‘offer spare parts and tools at a reasonable price’ is another important achievement, although independent repairers are still not granted the right to access all spare parts, tools and information for all products.
The repair preference goes out the window
There are also some clear missed opportunities, which are particularly disappointing because the provisions appeared in the original proposal or were added by the Parliament, but were eventually thrown out in trialogues. This is notably the case of the preference for repair over replacement as the remedy for goods under legal guarantee, which was part of the Commission’s proposal. Treating both options equally does not make sense from a sustainability point of view. A notable success, however, is that the first time repair is used as a remedy to bring the products into conformity, the guarantee period is extended by 12 months. This contributes to making repair more attractive and reassuring consumers about the quality of such a remedy.
As for the Parliament, it had proposed to prohibit commercial guarantees that discourage consumers from having their products repaired. Moreover, an amendment introduced a requirement for manufacturers to grant repair for products covered by the obligation unless factually or legally impossible, thus knocking down the economic argument. Those amendments did not make the final cut.
Still a long and uncertain way forward
This Directive, being a directive and not a regulation, will not apply directly in the Member States, but will have to be transposed into national law. The full extent of the right to repair it will provide will therefore not be known before a few years and may indeed vary between jurisdictions even though the Directive forbids Member States from maintaining or introducing diverging national provisions. In particular, Member States will have to implement at least one national measure promoting repair, which could take the form of repair vouchers, repair funds, online platforms for repair, training programs or taxation measures. Let us hope that such measures will help fill some of the gaps left by the Directive and that national ambitions will rise above EU ones in this case to make right to repair a reality in Europe.
