Empowering Sustainable Consumption by Giving Back to Consumers the ‘Right to Repair’

Ricardo J Hernandez, Constanza Miranda and Julian Goñi
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Ricardo J Hernandez: DILAB School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago 8320000 Chile
Constanza Miranda: DILAB School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago 8320000 Chile
Julian Goñi: DILAB School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago 8320000 Chile

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-15

Abstract: Industry has been considered a major actor regarding the actions and changes needed to achieve sustainable development. Different approximations to the topic have been developed to face the challenges of having a more responsible production of goods and services. These approximations include cleaner production, green design, ecodesign, eco efficiency, design for sustainable behavior, sustainable design, and more recently concepts like circular economies among many more. In all these approaches, the attention has been mainly on the production side while consumption has been tackled indirectly. The majority of laws and ordinances that have motivated the emergence of these approaches have traditionally been oriented to producers. However, an European Union (EU) directive launched in October 2019, called “right to repair”, could change this paradigm, empowering consumers by giving them more possibilities of repairing their products instead of discarding them. This paper presents a preliminary discussion about the effects this directive might have on how we consume products now and how we will consume them in the future.

Keywords: sustainable consumption; design; circular economy; right to repair (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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