Right to Repair

I lead U.S. PIRG’s campaign for Right to Repair, and I work to counter our throwaway culture by advocating for people to be able to fix their own stuff.  

I’ve been running social change campaigns since 2005, working on everything from recycling to tax policy and preschool access. I like working on campaigns where I can counter big opposition--whether it’s from Big Oil or Apple--with a groundswell of public support. In 2009, I mobilized so many people to deliver online comments to then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in opposition to cuts to the state parks budget that they crashed the Governor’s email servers, and we won the campaign. For my work on Right to Repair, Grist magazine recognized me as one of five top tech innovators in their 2020 Grist 50 list.

I live in Arlington, Mass., with my wife and two kids.

We have a stuff problem. Every year we consume 1.7 times what the earth can replenish, and 99 percent of the stuff in our consumption machine is thrown out within six months -- everything we harvest, mine, process and transport. This rapid increase in waste spells trouble for the planet and the climate. 

If we want to move to a more sustainable way of doing things, we need to find ways to repair, salvage and reuse more of our stuff, but we can't do that if companies set up intentional barriers to repair. Right to Repair is all about breaking down those barriers. 

I’m leading a campaign to win laws that make it impossible for companies to manufacture products that we’re not allowed to repair. We will elevate humanity by democratizing technology and making a healthier, more sustainable future possible.

Make, use, toss and buy again. We consume way too much, and manufacturers are locking many electronic products against re-use and repair. This rapid increase in electronic waste spells trouble for the planet, especially the climate. 

Manufacturers make the most money when people make, use, and toss their gadgets at the greatest possible speed. For example, Americans dispose of 416,000 cell phones per day. The costs of growing landfills, extractive mining of dwindling natural resources, electronic waste dumps in the developing world, and swirling gyres of plastic in the ocean don’t make it onto the quarterly profit reports sent to shareholders, but the world pays those costs nonetheless.

Manufacturers like Apple, Amazon, John Deere, Phillips and Samsung accelerate this problem by employing extraordinary measures to block access to maintenance of their products, fundamentally undermining the idea of ownership. Recently, we’ve seen that this can also have deadly consequences, as ventilators fall into disrepair when we need them most.

Right to Repair aims to give everyone access to the parts, tools, and service information they need to repair products so we can keep things in use and reduce waste. 

In recent years a scrappy band of tinkerers, DIYers, activists, repair technicians, frustrated consumers, farmers and digital rights advocates have managed to quickly scale up the dynamic Right to Repair campaign to not only have a global presence, but to begin to rack up some wins. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our pressure successfully moved major manufacturers such as GE to make it easier for hospitals to repair broken ventilators and treat patients. In the coming year, I’m keeping up the pressure on manufacturers and working to pass state-level Right to Repair legislation.

In the longer-term, we aim for sweeping, global changes to how we produce, consume, and repair our technology. The Right to Repair movement gives us an opportunity to talk about our throwaway culture and the companies who profit from that system, and empower people to chart a more sustainable path.

Broadly, the growing problems of e-waste and the monopolization of technology affect humanity at large. If we want to build a healthy, sustainable, livable future, we can’t keep making products designed to be consumed and disposed of at an ever-increasing pace.

More specifically, I’m working with sectors where manufacturers hinder progress by making it difficult to repair devices. For example, I work with farmers who are frustrated that they have to wait weeks in the middle of the growing season for manufacturers to send technicians to fix broken equipment. I work with biomedical technicians who need umpteen manufacturer certifications in order to repair medical devices that keep patients alive, wasting potentially billions in health care costs and putting patients at risk. While farmers and doctors don’t usually work together, I can bring them together to advocate for concrete, common-sense reforms to make their important work easier and more efficient.

In the process of building this campaign, I have worked with trade associations, professional associations, individual technicians, and activists. I’m learning more about the specific challenges they face and helping them be excellent spokespeople and advocates for Right to Repair.

I’m an action-oriented person--when there’s a problem, I want to find the solution and I want to put it into action. 

Right to Repair speaks to some of the most profound questions for modern humanity. Will we find ways to consume sustainably? Who controls our technology? How can we shift the paradigm from “more and more” to “better and better”? And, importantly, Right to Repair offers opportunities to take immediate action.

Through Right to Repair campaigns, we can make these big issues accessible to everyday people and a wide-ranging community of concerned activists.

In my work, I look for issues that allow me to speak to the need for a new kind economy, one that values human dignity and planetary harmony over the drive for economic growth at all costs. As we keep producing and consuming ever-increasing quantities of “stuff,” I’m pushing people to ask: How can we do a better job of improving the quality of our lives and our communities? Rather than exploiting our natural resources for marginal benefits for shareholders, the planet needs us to think smarter about how we produce, consume, and dispose of the trappings of our modern lives.

Right to Repair is one of the best opportunities to talk about changing this paradigm in a way that connects to common experience. There’s a very specific frustration people feel when trillion-dollar companies force them to continually upgrade expensive electronics. We can tap into that frustration to empower consumers to demand better.

In 2017, I brought U.S. PIRG and our network of state-based advocates into the Right to Repair movement, ready to take action across the country. Working closely with repair technicians and other experts, we’re bringing this issue to consumers and decision-makers.

It enrages me that manufacturers can block me from fixing my own things. There’s a sense of power, agency, and perspective people gain from being able to take care of themselves and take care of each other, and manufacturers are disrupting this. I’m not okay with that.

When I take out the toolbox to fix something, I gain a deeper appreciation for the product. I value it more, and I more fully understand and respect what goes into creating the product and keeping it working. It also makes me less likely to dispose of my things thoughtlessly or purchase things that won’t last. It gets me thinking about the sustainable world I want my kids to inherit, without toxic e-waste disrupting our environment or our health.

I envision a world where people are empowered to take care of themselves, their families, and their communities in a sustainable fashion. Working on Right to Repair is my way of reshaping the way we think about the world around us.

Social change doesn’t happen behind closed doors--social change happens when people make their voices heard. I’ve spent the last 15 years helping people make their voices heard on campaigns for the environment, good government, and education.

It’s my job to make sure that I’m meeting the public where they’re at, using straightforward language to connect big issues to personal experience. On a campaign to ban single-use plastics years ago, I thought up the tagline “Nothing we use for five minutes should pollute our environment for hundreds of years,” which many successful campaigns have used in the years since, and which Gov. Schwarzenegger said when he signed the first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags into law. For Right to Repair, I focus the message around common experiences, like having to buy a new phone because of one minor problem. 

I’m also using my organizing background to help develop spokespeople with compelling personal stories. I work with nonprofits who help people get back on their feet after incarceration by training them in repair and refurbishing, and I help rural technicians tell legislators how critical independent repair is to rural life, far away from manufacturer service.

Furthermore, with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, I work with our network of state-based organizations. While I take the lead on policy and messaging, state advocates work with local elected officials and expand the community of advocates. Together, we can learn what campaign strategies work best, start winning locally, and work toward bigger change.

In March 2020, along with the rest of the world, I watched as COVID-19 upended my plans. 2020 was looking to be a banner year for Right to Repair, as we were getting close to passing the first state-level Right to Repair law, but legislatures shut down and the world’s priorities shifted.

But rather than sitting quietly and biding my time until 2021, I dove straight into COVID-19 response.

Very quickly, it became apparent that Right to Repair had a key role to play in responding to the pandemic. Hospitals needed more working ventilators as soon as possible to treat an influx of COVID-19 patients, and manufacturers made it difficult for hospitals to fix the thousands of broken ventilators in storage around the country. After my team spent weeks calling on manufacturers to release repair information--generating news stories, gathering petitions, and mobilizing elected officials--three major manufacturers took action.

In addition to immediately making a difference for hospitals and patients, this response work strengthened the campaign overall. I built relationships with a new community of advocates and am better prepared to help win Right to Repair laws when state legislatures pick up again.

It’s no secret: American politics are fractured. When everything we do seems politicized, Right to Repair is a rare opportunity to bring people together from both sides of the aisle. 

A key role I play is expanding the community by listening and building trust between diverse groups. One state coalition, for example, includes a state GOP leader and a business owner whose Trump bobblehead is sometimes visible in our video calls working closely with environmentalists and social justice nonprofits. When one person has a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat and another has a ‘Black Lives Matter’ shirt, it would be very easy to let political mistrust derail our efforts. Our progress is proof that if we build relationships across the lines that are supposed to divide us, help people understand each other, form trust, and work together, we can move forward. There are so many voices telling us we can’t ever trust our political opponents, that they can never understand, and I believe that dismantling that fallacy is critical to my campaign and the world I envision. 

It takes a relentless dedication to that ideal to maintain a politically diverse coalition, but it’s something I am dedicated to doing.

Right to Repair may be a very simple idea, but it has the potential to disrupt both our throwaway culture and the system that perpetuates that culture. 

Right now, we’re caught in a vicious cycle. Under the auspices of meeting consumer demand, tech manufacturers churn out and market new devices each year, and put up barriers to repairing the old devices. Consumers then purchase new devices and throw away the old whether they want to or not, further feeding the beast that will produce 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 if left unchecked. Right to Repair disrupts that cycle on both the manufacturer and the consumer ends by removing barriers to repairing our own stuff and growing the movement of people who reject the throwaway culture.

Right to Repair also gives power and agency over technology to those who can’t afford the latest devices or top-dollar manufacturer service. 

Ultimately, through Right to Repair, we’re contributing to efforts to reimagine our economy as one that’s focused on stronger, more sustainable communities where people are empowered to take care of themselves and each other.

We want to fundamentally change our relationship with ‘stuff.’ Right now, most Americans embrace the throwaway culture, and it’s taking a toll on our planet.

When we launched our campaign, rather than tackle the overconsumption problem in its entirety, our theory was to identify a smaller specific problem that most people could easily understand and had personal experience with -- the frustration of not being able to fix your own electronics -- to start a bigger conversation about sustainable consumption. As the campaign has evolved, we’ve highlighted other examples that make sense to people at the current moment, such as the inability of hospitals to repair ventilators during a pandemic. We then use those stories to educate the public through the media and our outreach work. We’ve also worked to grow and elevate the diverse community of people already involved in the Right to Repair movement to bring more voices to the table and tell Right to Repair stories in a way that resonates with the broadest constituencies of people. Finally, we’re giving people the opportunity to do something about this massive and seemingly overwhelming problem that’s very tangible and concrete, which will help those who want to do something see that progress is possible. Success breeds success, and each small step will lead us closer to systemic change we need.      

Related, another key part of our theory of change is that we just can’t wait for the shift in our throwaway culture -- we need to start chipping away at the problem now. Right to Repair is popular across the political spectrum and we can (and already are) winning laws and corporate campaigns that will make a real impact on the problem today. Right to Repair laws and corporate policy changes will help keep tens of thousands of smartphones, tractors, ventilators in working condition rather than in the scrap heap.

Right to Repair serves the U.S. and global populations broadly.

The goal of our Right to Repair campaign is to make it impossible for companies to manufacture products that we’re not allowed to repair. In the coming year, we aim to win the first state-level Right to Repair law in the U.S. After this initial victory we want to bring more manufacturers and sectors to the table, calling on them to commit to making the parts, tools, and service information to their products available by default, rather than by law or after acute public pressure in a crisis.

Depending on our success on these two fronts, we will identify the next steps. Possibilities include winning laws in more and more states, winning federal law, or working with manufacturers globally.

The main barrier to winning Right to Repair is manufacturer opposition. 

Trillion-dollar companies like Apple are very invested in the status quo, and they have well-established means to push back against Right to Repair. Manufacturers have a number of trade associations that lobby heavily against Right to Repair, such as TechNet, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers and the Consumer Technology Association. We analyzed state lobbying in New York in 2018, and found that our opposition spent 23 times what the pro-Right-to-Repair coalition spent. We also found that the combined market cap for companies who indicated they lobbied around Right to Repair was $2.5 trillion. 

The opposition also creates new lobbying groups, such as the “Security Innovation Center,” which is hosted by a corporate public relations firm. These groups produce misleading, scary-sounding analysis that Right to Repair will endanger cybersecurity. 

We can overcome manufacturer opposition by building a groundswell of public support. Polling shows that around 80% of people support Right to Repair -- 86% of Massachusetts voters approved Right to Repair language on the ballot in 2012. Decision-makers need to see their constituents know and care about Right to Repair.

In recent years we have been building up diverse state-level coalitions with policy experts, building trust between stakeholders, and making the case for Right to Repair in the media. We have produced original research on the benefits to the climate and reductions in waste by advancing and protecting repair. We also work with leading cybersecurity experts through securepairs.org to counter misinformation from manufacturer-funded lobbying groups.

Nationally, the leading organizations supporting Right to Repair are U.S. PIRG, iFixit.com and Repair.org. Other leading supporting organizations include EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Consumer Reports Advocacy. 

Locally, our coalitions include legislators from both sides of the aisle, environmentalists, social justice nonprofits, farmers, STEM educators, DIY enthusiasts, repair technicians, and more. We work together to set priorities, cultivate effective spokespeople who can share compelling personal stories, work with the media, and lobby decision-makers.

I work with U.S. PIRG, the U.S. Public Interest Group. U.S. PIRG is an independent, non-partisan citizen-funded 501(c)(4) organization that advocates for the public interest. Our team of national policy experts, state office directors, and outreach staff across the country serve as counterweights to the influence of powerful special interests that threaten our health, safety and well-being. Since the 1980s, tens of thousands of dues-paying members have supported our work annually. In addition to supporting our work with financial contributions, members support our work by signing petitions, calling decision-makers, weighing in on public decisions, and sharing our work with friends and family.

While decades of careful planning and spending have helped us weather previous financial downturns, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented disruption of our membership drive and key parts of our fundraising model. Our members have continued to support our work through one-time and monthly contributions, but the pandemic halted our traditional model for recruiting new members.

Along with our sister 501(c)(3) organization, U.S. PIRG Education Fund, we are focused on generating more revenue so that we can not only maintain our current level of work, but expand it to meet the challenges of our time. We are directing more efforts into fundraising from new foundations and large donors, deepening commitments from our existing donors, and experimenting with new kinds of digital outreach.

U.S. PIRG Education Fund has raised three foundation grants to support Right to Repair:

Lisa and Douglas Goldman Foundation ($40,000)
Economic Security Project ($25,000)
Johnson Family Foundation ($20,000)

My team has raised an additional $20,000 from donors to support Right to Repair work.

U.S. PIRG and U.S. PIRG Education Fund aim to jointly raise $315,000 each year for the next two years to support our efforts to win Right to Repair laws. We have raised $75,000 since COVID-19 began and aim to raise an additional $240,000.

U.S. PIRG and U.S. PIRG Education Fund have set a joint Right to Repair budget of $315,000 for FY21 (July 1, 2020 - June 30, 2021). This would support our national program staff, state staff, research, communications, digital outreach, program and administrative support, and operating costs.

A few years ago, Right to Repair was largely just a scrappy group of frustrated repair technicians. Now, it’s a coordinated, multi-state, multinational movement that’s making real progress. We have momentum, and with additional financial support and exposure we can do even more. We could grow and deepen our network of supporters, train and develop more committed activists into effective advocates, expand our movement in more states and partner with new international efforts, produce more original research and invest in digital marketing.

We would like to expand our partnerships with manufacturers who agree with our goals, and do not think that it’s sustainable to lock repair into a proprietary system. These partnerships would allow us to demonstrate that respecting consumer repair is a reasonable choice for any manufacturer, and help increase pressure on the companies that lead the opposition to repair.