Repair of electr(on)ic products: current practices in Barcelona

Aymerich Matarin, Anna; Gasol, Carles M; Talens Peiró, Laura

OPEN ACCESS at Procedia CIRP (2022) Volume 105, Pages 104-109

In the past years, the need for more durable and repairable products has progressively increased. The 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan includes some actions to develop legislative and non-legislative measures for the “right to repair”. Implementing measures to favour repair are limited and not uniformly included in EU ecodesign regulations which denotes the need to advance in a more systematic analysis of repair and repairability of electr(on)ics. This paper revises methods for assessing repair and reparability of electr(on)ics. The analysis has allowed to identify opportunities to investigate further the feasibility to use the EN 45554, and the eDIM methods. The results obtained from the analysis of tertiary coffee machines has help identify design features to facilitate their repair and remanufacturing. Regular maintenance and material selection resulted to be potential key aspects to maximize the durability of some of their priority parts. The analysis of small household electr(on)ics shows that in general about 50% of the products taken to repair events were successfully repaired. One third of the products were hard or impossible to disassembly due to the use of connectors such as glue and single snap fits, while the remaining products were sent to recycling. Previous information and knowledge about the electr(on)ic was crucial to facilitate the repair, and also to assess repairability. Few suggestions to improve the quality of data collected during the events were proposed and successfully implemented in an on-line survey. Despite the efforts done on standardisation, the results show some still existing limitations to apply the proposed methods to electr(on)ics.