My first phone was a Nokia 3210, a cute grey brick with just enough computing power to run Snake. Compared with today’s sleek 5G touchscreen devices it was pretty pants, except in one way: I could repair it. The case, keyboard and battery could, without any special tools, be disassembled and replaced when they cracked or wore out. Unlike iPhones, which arrived on the market as impressive but inscrutable hermetic black boxes – impossible for customers to fix at home – my old Nokia was designed for repair.
Today, however, many manufacturers deliberately discourage mending by making their products hard or confusing to tinker with. This inevitably means more rubbish, with the UN estimating that the volume of electronic waste is rising five times faster than recycling rates. Though on paper, the UK government has set ambitious targets to halve the amount of waste Britons produce by 2042, in practice less mending means more demand for more new products, stimulating consumption and fuelling economic growth. For politicians more anxious about growing GDP than wellbeing, repair has simply not been a priority.
But that could be about to change – at least in the EU. Earlier this month the European parliament adopted new rules that will force manufacturers to make it easier for consumers to repair their products. The directive will initially only cover household goods like phones, washing machines and vacuum cleaners, but it is estimated that it will save customers €176.5bn over 15 years and prevent the emission of 18.4m tonnes of CO2. Advocates hope that, over time, the “right to repair” will expand to cover more products, gradually re-writing the conventions of throwaway consumerism.
British planners and housing developers, take note. It is not just plastic consumer goods that can be refurbished and repaired, but bricks and mortar too. Of the 222m tonnes of waste the UK typically produces annually, about 62% is from the construction sector. Though the severe ecological impact of demolition-led construction is becoming better known, Britain is still addicted to the wrecking ball, knocking down tens of thousands of decent buildings every year rather than refurbishing them. Pensioners in Bexley in south-east London for instance, recently resorted to occupying the Lesnes Estate in an attempt to persuade the landlord, Peabody, to fix their homes instead of flattening them.
From iPads to tower blocks, mending more and destroying less is critical to making western economies sustainable, but while the EU’s new rules could force Apple to make its devices more repairable, architecture faces a far bigger challenge. Britain’s dysfunctional relationship with building maintenance has created a ticking timebomb in the housing sector that could plunge thousands of homeowners into destitution when it explodes. New flats in large blocks are often sold on 125-year leases, but many depend on hard-to-repair components like lifts, windows and cladding that will fail decades sooner, potentially bankrupting residents with eye-watering replacement charges.
“Contemporary construction materials are warranted for an average of 10 years,” says Paloma Gormley, co-founder of the ecological architecture practice Material Cultures. She fears many new buildings are not being designed with maintenance in mind. Double-glazed windows, for instance, depend on a seal between the panes that holds special gases. “Over time, the vacuums mostly fail and the gases are released, massively decreasing the effectiveness of the glazing,” Gormley explains. So new high-rises with floor-to-ceiling glazing may require their entire facades to be replaced within just a few decades.
Leaseholders were hit with impossible bills and billions were wiped off the value of property development companies as the enormous cost of replacing flammable cladding in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire became clear. Now imagine the price tag for replacing not just cladding but double glazing, sprinkler systems, air conditioning, lifts and so on. A former head of planning at the City of London, Peter Rees, has tried to raise the alarm, telling Building Design magazine that Britain is not prepared for the cost or complexity of repairing its new-build housing stock. “I fear we’ll have the Thames lined with derelict towers,” he warned. “If future refurbishment cycles cannot be funded by the apartment owners, their investments will become unsellable long before the expiry of their 125-year lease.”
In a country where a cardigan can be thrown out due to a single hole or a toaster sent to landfill with just a loose wire, it is easy to see how a society saturated with cheap products has fallen out of love with maintenance and become dependent on disposal and replacement instead. Which is why the EU’s new right to repair directive is a critical step forward for European economies, and a template that should be taken up by the governments across the globe. But meaningful change can’t only be legislative: from Brussels to Bexley, a genuinely low-carbon economy will require a far more widespread and ambitious culture of care, maintenance and mending of both household goods and houses themselves.
Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
