Australians also want to be able to repair their products more easily – 79 per cent of respondents were in favour of forcing manufacturers to print labels about ease of sourcing spare parts, and three-quarters supported a standardised repairability score.
Whether third-party repairers could fix appliances or the manufacturer required a specific authorised repairer, and whether parts were available locally would form part of the score.
The CPRC says that in the absence of such information, consumers are left to rely on energy efficiency and other unregulated environmental claims, which can often be misleading, about products to ascertain their quality.
There are renewed calls for manufacturers to be forced to plaster expected lifespan labels on their appliances. Credit: Nathan Perri
In June, the European Union brought in laws requiring repairability scores to be displayed on a product’s energy efficiency labels – reforms predicted to save consumers €20 billion by 2030. The CPRC believes that labelling laws in Australia could save households up to $1.2 billion a year by avoiding appliance waste.
“Currently, all we have to determine lifespan is customer reviews, word of mouth or the warranty. We want to know how long it’ll last, and as soon as you mention the idea of these labels, Australians lean forward,” Campbell said.
“Manufacturers know this information – we just want it to be shared. It’s about consumers making an informed decision on the trade-off between spending less and a lower lifespan, versus investing in something that’ll last longer,” she said.
If you can get a toaster for $20-$30 instead of $200, the premise is that when it breaks you’re not going to bother repairing it.
Simon Lockrey, a professor at RMIT’s school of design.
The call for lifespan and repairability disclosures comes about four years after a Productivity Commission report into the “right to repair”, which recommended repairability and durability labels, as part of a raft of measures for a broad range of products including electronics, vehicles and appliances. They included reforms to consumer laws, such as adding a right to software updates for products to consumer guarantees.
Dr Simran Talwar, who leads the resource stewardship program at the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures, is frustrated at a lack of progress since the Commission’s report. “Not a lot of action has happened since,” she said.
The call for lifespan and repairability disclosures comes about four years after a Productivity Commission report into the “right to repair”.Credit: iStock
In the absence of laws, and with manufacturing continuing to be offshored, where labour is cheaper and goods can ultimately be sold for less, repairability culture in Australia suffers, Talwar said.
She said that while many categories of objects were breaking down sooner than in the past, it was difficult to say whether that was due to a deliberate intention from manufacturers – known as planned or built-in obsolescence – or consumer demand for cheaper goods.
“The materials being used for products have been changing. We used to have a lot of metal-based products, and that has been moving to plastics. It’s not only a cheaper product, but plastic weighs less, which makes products cheaper to transport too,” Talwar said.
Simon Lockrey, a professor at RMIT’s school of design who has designed products at companies including Dyson, echoed concerns about how difficult it was to repair items in Australia.
“We’ve lost much of our repair industry,” he said, noting car mechanics as one industry where there was still a strong market for repair.
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Lockrey recounted the difficulty he had in getting his coffee machine repaired recently. “I ran around Melbourne for a few weeks, and three of the coffee machine repairers said they wouldn’t touch this brand. There were no local repairers listed, but I finally found someone who had fixed this machine before by frankensteining some parts together,” he said.
Too often, repairing in Australia is more costly than buying a replacement, Lockrey said.
“If you can get a toaster for $20-$30 instead of $200, the premise is that when it breaks you’re not going to bother repairing it,” he said.
