Right to Repair: Why It Matters for the Climate
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Your phone breaks. The screen cracks, or the battery dies. You want to fix it. But the manufacturer made sure you can’t — and that’s not an accident.
Dear IMPT Family,
We live inside a strange economic model: goods are designed to fail or become unusable, and replacement is the default. A cracked screen on a phone can’t be swapped cheaply; you’re encouraged to buy a new phone. A washing machine with a broken component gets binned rather than repaired. A laptop with a dead battery becomes e-waste.
The climate cost of this cycle is enormous. Manufacturing electronics consumes energy, rare minerals, and water. Most of the emissions from a phone happen before it reaches you. When manufacturers engineer devices so repairs are impossible—or so expensive that replacement makes financial sense—they’re engineering massive carbon emissions into the system. The right to repair movement challenges that logic. It’s not romantic. It’s arithmetic.
🔥 Key Highlights 🔥
1️⃣ Manufacturing accounts for 75–90 percent of a device’s carbon footprint
2️⃣ Manufacturers actively prevent repairs to drive replacement cycles
3️⃣ Right-to-repair laws are shifting who owns your electronics
4️⃣ Independent repair extends device life by 2–5 years on average
5️⃣ E-waste from discarded devices costs the climate and the planet
6️⃣ You already own the device — the law is catching up to that reality
1️⃣ The Carbon Is Baked In Before You Buy
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the biggest carbon cost of a smartphone comes from manufacturing, not from using it. Mining the minerals, producing the rare earths, smelting the metals, assembling the components in factories across continents — that all happens before the phone sits in your hand.
If you replace a phone every two years and keep it for four, you’re cutting that device’s per-year carbon footprint in half. If you keep it for six years, you’ve halved it again. The maths is straightforward: keep the device longer, and the manufacturing carbon spreads across more years of service.
2️⃣ Manufacturers Engineered Repair Out of Reach
This isn’t negligence. It’s deliberate design. Phones are glued rather than screwed together. Batteries are soldered to motherboards instead of being modular. Screens are bonded in ways that make replacement impossible without destroying the device. Software locks prevent third-party parts from working, even if the hardware would fit.
Why? Because replacement components are high-margin revenue. A broken screen becomes a $300 repair through official channels — or a $600 phone replacement. The manufacturer controls both, and neither incentivises you to fix it cheaply.
3️⃣ The Right to Repair Is Legal Leverage
The right to repair movement argues a simple point: you bought the device. You should be able to fix it. Legislation is starting to agree. The EU has passed right-to-repair rules for certain appliances. Massachusetts voted for it in the US. Manufacturers are starting to release repair documentation and sell parts to independent shops.
This matters because it flips the equation. If you can get a replacement screen for $50, and install it yourself or take it to a local shop, the decision to replace the entire phone becomes less automatic. The economics shift toward repair.
4️⃣ Extending a Device’s Life Has Outsized Impact
Studies suggest the average person replaces their phone every 2–3 years. If right-to-repair access extends that to 5–6 years, you’ve cut the per-year manufacturing carbon by half or more. That’s more carbon saved than almost any other individual choice you could make — more than switching energy providers, more than optimising your diet, more than buying carbon-neutral shipping.
Yet it barely registers in climate conversations. The reason is political: the carbon savings don’t benefit manufacturers.
5️⃣ The Hidden Cost of E-Waste
When devices can’t be repaired, they’re discarded. Over 60 million tonnes of e-waste end up in landfills or informal recycling sites globally each year. Recycling recovers some materials, but it’s energy-intensive. Much e-waste ends up in countries with minimal environmental or labour protections, where toxic materials leach into soil and water.
If devices were designed to last longer and remain repairable, the e-waste crisis would shrink dramatically. Repair is the upstream answer to the downstream waste problem.
6️⃣ The Politics Behind the Silence
Manufacturers lobby hard against right-to-repair laws. The argument is “safety” or “intellectual property”, but the real issue is profit margin. Repair eats into replacement sales.
You own your phone. That’s not radical. But the legal right to repair it — to find a third-party battery, to hire a local technician, to use spare parts — is still being fought in legislatures. When it becomes universal, the climate math will shift noticeably.
Looking Ahead — Ownership Means Repair
The right to repair is fundamentally about ownership. If you own something, you should be able to fix it. This isn’t nostalgia for a more analog time — it’s pragmatism. Devices built to last and be repaired emit far less carbon across their lifespan. Legislation that enables repair will be one of the quiet climate wins of this decade, without requiring you to sacrifice convenience or buy new gadgets.
Let’s keep building — together. 🌍💚
