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Sooner or later, all electronic products will stop working. Some part will get fried. Some internal system will slip out of whack. Entropy will inevitably collect its due. What do you do then? If the product in question is a car, no one would answer, “Recycle it and get a new one.” Recycling that car would mean tearing it to pieces, separating out the plastic and glass and metals that it’s made of, then smelting those down so they can be sold back into the market. Recycling any electronic product similarly means extracting all the constituent materials of that highly engineered product and reverting them back to their original state—their most basic, literally elemental form. By and large, recycling is the most inefficient, most laborand energy-intensive method of getting further use out of just about any given product. 

When it comes to a malfunctioning car, most people start by trying to repair it. You can do that yourself or take it to the dealer you bought it from or to an independent repair shop. When it comes to a whole range of smaller products, however, everything from lamps to vacuums, it’s not nearly as common or easy to fix things when they break down. Especially when it comes to digital devices—like phones, tablets, and laptops—the default is: When it breaks, just replace it. 

This is no accident. It’s the result of a deliberate corporate strategy. It was that strategy that Wiens set out to battle.

The most obvious reason to fix an electronic product (or any product, really) rather than replace it is simple: Repair is usually cheaper. To that personal motive, add a planetary one: the more electronic products whose lives we extend via repair, the fewer natural resources and the less energy we need to manufacture new electronic products. The imperative to fix things, writes journalist Aaron Perzanowski in The Right to Repair, “grows out of a recognition that resources are finite, that the planet is small, and that a culture that overlooks those facts imperils its future. Repair allows us to extract maximum value from the artifacts we create.”

Excerpted from Chp 10 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.