Planned obsolescence is once once more making headlines. To fight once morest the phenomenon, Zakia Khattabi recently explained that she was working on a very important weapon once morest this obsolescence of electronic objects and the resulting waste.
Concretely, it would be a question of creating a model similar to that of the nutriscore or the ecoscore. It would make it possible, via an easy and readable system, to determine whether a household appliance, computer or iPhone is repairable or not.
The subject is far from trivial when we know that 160,000 tonnes of household appliances are scrapped in Belgium each year. Giving a second life to these devices not only makes it possible to avoid a certain amount of waste, but also to create local employment dedicated to these repairs, while taking care to use wisely certain raw materials present in these devices and whose rarity is growing.
A future legal framework
On the legal level, for telephone and computer equipment, a separate bill provides for the obligation to inform the buyer of the compatibility period of the software. Manufacturers and vendors will provide information on maintaining software compatibility. The consumer will thus be informed of the duration during which his device will support the successive updates.
The Belgian federal government has a bill in hand which will oblige, by 2023, all sellers to display a repairability index for electronic devices. We will therefore have to wait until next year to see the project come to fruition.
