Cheap devices are turning durability into someone else’s waste bill

Short product lifespans are usually treated as a consumer gripe. They are better understood as a business model. A device built to a price, glued shut and unsupported by spare parts earns its margin at the till. The cost of its early death lands on households, councils and recyclers. The right-to-repair argument is about who pays that bill, and it is getting louder.

Offshore courts have stopped waiting

Global e-waste hit 62 million tonnes in 2022 and is projected to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030, according to analysis republished this week. Regulators and courts are now acting on it. European consumer associations pushed Nintendo into offering free repairs for Switch controllers after a premature-obsolescence complaint, and in Australia the Federal Court ordered Apple to pay A$9 million (NZ$11.1 million) for misleading iPhone users about their repair and replacement rights under Australian Consumer Law. Australia already has right-to-repair rules for motor vehicles and is consulting on agricultural machinery. The EU has gone further, with design rules and a reparability score that shapes what gets sold.

New Zealand is still the outlier

In 2024, New Zealand was the only OECD country without e-waste regulations. That year Consumer NZ delivered a petition signed by more than 21,000 people calling for repairability labelling and a fix to the Consumer Guarantees Act loophole that lets manufacturers opt out of supplying spare parts.

The legislative answer, the Consumer Guarantees (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill, failed in September 2025 despite early cross-party support and a favourable select committee report. It would have covered electronic goods over $100 and given manufacturers three years’ notice, hardly a regulatory ambush. Marama Davidson, who led the bill, warned at the time that “we could end up being the dumping ground“.

The bill nobody put on the invoice

New Zealanders throw away roughly 98,000 to 100,000 tonnes of e-waste a year. A 2025 open letter to MPs put that at 2.5 times the world average, with only 2% recycled.

The lifespans explain the volume. BusinessDesk reported in 2023 that electronic products that once lasted around 40 years now last between 1.5 and 13 years, averaging 4.5, and that some retailers sent easily repairable small appliances straight to landfill. A 2023 Consumer NZ survey found 89% of faulty mobile phones were no older than four years, half of them under two.

This is not a free-market outcome in any meaningful sense. A market works when the party making the decision bears its cost. Here the importer books the sale and the ratepayer books the disposal. Fiscal conservatives who object to councils loading rates with costs they do not control should recognise this one.

The tactics are harder to defend

A 2024 University of Auckland feature catalogued the playbook: products designed to be hard or impossible to fix, copyright on repair manuals, authorised-repairer-only policies and spare parts that are simply never made. As the expert interviewed put it, “goods used to last for decades. Now we’re expected to accept that appliances like fridges will last only ten years.” Software locks have added another layer, making DIY repairs legally fraught.

Retail floors have not helped. A 2022 Consumer NZ mystery shop of Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming, PB Tech and Warehouse Stationery found staff quoting smartphone lifespans of anywhere from one to seven years, with no standard repairability information. That is exactly the kind of loose claim the Apple case shows can become expensive.

Repair is a revenue line, not a threat

The best rebuttal to the industry’s cost argument comes from industry. Blunt founder Greig Brebner told The Post in 2024 that lifespan is won in design, not by lecturing customers, or “you’re going to be battling it forever“. Blunt’s repairs cost around $10, and offering more of them increased demand and made the service commercially sustainable rather than cannibalising new sales. Coffee machine maker La Marzocco takes a similar approach locally. Durability, done well, is a brand asset.

The pause will not last

The 2025 bill’s failure was a pause, not a verdict. The data case has been built over three years by Consumer NZ, academics and the waste sector, and Australian precedent travels fast across the Tasman into consumer expectations. Existing consumer and fair trading law can already bite on misleading repair claims without any new statute.

Retailers and importers have a choice. They can audit their lifespan claims, secure spare parts supply and treat repairability as a selling point now, on their own terms. Or they can wait for the next bill, written by someone else.

Sources

• 1News: Devices aren’t lasting as long as they should. Here’s why (2026-11-08)
• 1News: Pressure builds to give Kiwis right to repair (2024-08-31)
• Consumer NZ: 21,000-strong petition delivered to Parliament is a powerful call for repairable products (2024-08-28)
• RNZ: Politics sink landfill-saving Right to Repair Bill (2025-09-16)
• Sustainable Business Network: Open letter to Members of Parliament – Support the Right to Repair Bill (2025-02-17)
• BusinessDesk: We need to work together to tackle NZ’s growing waste problem (2023-09-18)
• RNZ: How long should everyday appliances last? Why NZ needs a minimum product lifespan law (2024-05-30)
• University of Auckland: Fighting for the right to repair (2024-11-08)
• The Conversation: Too many products are easier to throw away than fix, NZ consumers deserve a ‘right to repair’ (2023-10-25)
• Consumer NZ: Information about repairability and reliability lacking at big box retailers (2022-11-18)
• The Post: Repairing ‘replacement culture’: The right to repair gains ground (2024-11-24)