You buy stuff. It breaks or doesn't work right. You could throw it away and buy new stuff, but you'd rather repair it. But then you find out you can't do it yourself, you can't even bring it to a third party repair shop. You have to bring it back to the original company, which can charge an arm and a leg because there's no competition—and sometimes they just won’t fix it. And you decide to throw the thing away.
It means more cost to consumers, and also means more waste. Americans throw out 416,000 cell phones per day, and only 15 to 20 percent of electronic waste is recycled.
We imagine a different kind of system, where instead of throwing things out, we reuse, salvage and rebuild. But that means taking on the big companies who would push us into buying more and throwing more away. The goal of our Right to Repair campaign is to give every consumer and small business access to the parts, tools and service information they need to repair products so we can keep things in use and reduce waste.