Consumerism, Sustainability and circular economy

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is a marquee step in direction of making the world is better place for further generations and reducing the ecological damage has been done in the industrial age.

The characteristics of sustainable product as stated by the regulation includes "Uses less energy", "Lasts longer" and "Can be easily repaired" amongst many others. In my view, there needs to more emphasize on making the products "lasts longer", as that would significantly reduce the energy & resource consumption in production and recycling. Characteristics like "Can be easily recycled" and "Contains more recycled content" should not be an excuse for reduced life of products/ frequent upgrades.

Today's economy is driven by consumerism, there is urge created to replace/ upgrade at frequent intervals starting from mobile phones. Though "lasts longer" has been stated as required characteristics, penalizing frequent/ forced upgrades should be one of the ways to implement this. Environment has been the biggest neglected aspect in the consumerism-based economy.

The technology advancement in recycling is extremely low with respect to new technologies. For example, the Li-ion battery, the key component of mobile & portable devices and the core building block of electrification of personal transport, does not have a viable solution for recycling yet and the current scale of recycling is in single digits only.

The ESPR makes the right start, by bringing all the characteristics to be incorporated in the design stage itself.

To extend the life and last longer, there needs to be modularity in design, which would help replace specific components (I saw DELL laptops that allows user to upgrade RAM and SSD disks which does not void the warranty, in fact these are called user upgradable parts in the manual itself). Should have open standards-based interfaces so that it can co-exist with least friction in the ecosystem and does not require added components (no custom connector for charging/ data, adopt USB-C connector) It needs to be repairable preferably in DIY manner with parts available in reasonable rates (recently, had to junk a monitor as the replacement of the display was difficult to find and costed more than 65% of the new monitor price).

The consumer product companies need to be pushed with regulations to make their products adhere to circular economy like ESPR, otherwise they do not have any incentives. but equal emphasis should be placed on educating the consumers on environmental impact. One aspect of ESPR that aids this, the need to implement "Digital product passport" for the products.

Consumer behavior change will force the product companies as well