The Right to Repair Hierarchy of Benefits

In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow had an insight: Underlying human behavior is the drive to satisfy a hierarchy of needs, ranging from the basic (think food and water) to higher- order needs (like love and self-actualization). Decades later, someone illustrated Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a pyramid:

At the risk of applying apples to oranges, we’ve created a Right to Repair Hierarchy of Benefits.

Let’s be clear: We’re not arguing that people wanting the right to repair their stuff is the same as people needing sleep or friendship. But as lawmakers and corporations apply the right to repair to an expanding range of electronics and appliances, the benefits are coming into focus.

What does a Right to Repair Hierarchy of Benefits look like? Like this:

Individual material benefits

Let’s start at the base of the Right to Repair pyramid with individual material benefits. 

When you have the right to repair your stuff, it’s easier to save money. That smartphone that seemed impossible or prohibitively expensive to fix a few years ago? It becomes not-so-impossible and not-so-expensive to fix once Apple, Google and other smartphone makers are required to supply you and independent repair shops with the right tools, materials and manuals. These rights are now enjoyed by about one-quarter of all Americans, thanks to PIRG-backed laws in eight states.

When you can more easily repair your stuff, it’s also easier to avoid having so much junk clutter your life and fill up your trash. That old smartphone with a dying battery can keep working just fine, thank you very much, instead of taking up space in your kitchen drawer or your wastebasket.

By the way, these benefits are even more important if you’re a farmer. Imagine how much easier it is to repair your own tractor when you have access to the right tools, parts and information. It sure beats the hell out of waiting for the nearest authorized John Deere dealer to get around to fixing your machine.

Community material benefits

Even if you’re not the type of person who likes to take things apart and put them together again, the Right to Repair gives you options.

You can go to the Apple Store to fix your iPhone if that’s your preference. But under the Right to Repair, Apple also has to give your local downtown repair shop access to the relevant tools, parts and manuals. 

That’s good for you as a consumer. It’s also good for your community. The nice people at Jane’s Repair Shop get more business, which helps make your main street a livelier place to be. Relationships grow and deepen. A place becomes a community.

This dynamic also helps create, sustain and expand ecosystems of repair. When people know how to repair stuff, they tend to pass on that knowledge, whether through YouTube videos or local repair clinics. 

You can still go to the Apple Store. But it’s nice to have local alternatives and the sense of community and communal self-reliance that come with them.

Social and environmental benefits

Let’s look beyond the neighborhood, where the picture of what our throwaway economy does to the environment isn’t pretty.

A recent report documented 68 million tons of e-waste worldwide. The same report predicted that number will reach 90 million tons in 2030.

Extending the Right to Repair nationwide would keep a lot of electronics out of the trash and, more importantly, out of landfills and incinerators. That matters because e-waste contains a toxic stew of more than 1,000 chemicals and heavy metals, including lead, mercury, arsenic and other nasty substances. Landfills leak this toxic stuff into the soil and groundwater. Incinerators emit it into the air. None of it is good for human health and it’s no picnic for wildlife either.

When people keep their electronics and appliances in good working order longer, we also reduce the pollution emitted by the manufacturing of these products. If Americans used our cell phones for one more year, for example, the carbon pollution avoided would be equivalent to growing nearly 3 million tree seedlings for 10 years.

When people can repair their stuff instead of replacing it with new stuff, we also ease the pressure on the Earth’s finite resources. Researchers estimate that a Europe-wide Right to Repair would eliminate the need for 1.8 million tons of natural resources, including rare earth minerals.

With companies pushing to mine for scarce resources in the ecologically sensitive deep seas, any way we can reduce the demand for these resources is a big win for the planet.

Potentially, just maybe, transformative benefits

The top layer of our pyramid is filled with less tangible, but in some ways more profound benefits. 

The modern economy trains our minds to think of stuff as disposable. You buy new stuff. It breaks or just gets old. You buy more new stuff. It breaks … and so on and so on.

But most stuff doesn’t have to be disposable. Smartphones are amazing devices. For their first few years, they improved by leaps and bounds with each new model. Most of us, myself included, eagerly wanted to upgrade to use the newer features every year or two or three. 

But these days, the differences in performance with the latest models aren’t as great. And, if you can just fix the broken screen or replace the worn-out battery without spending an arm and a leg and jumping through a set of corporate hoops, your relationship to that phone may change. It’s no longer disposable. It’s maintainable. 

By changing your relationship to your stuff, you may start to change your mindset about consumption in general. It becomes more about buying what you need, and taking care of what you have, so you don’t need to buy as much. It’s not just a money-saver. It’s a mind-changer.

The Right to Repair might also just change your relationship to your community. If you ever attend a repair café or fix-it workshop, you’ll meet some new people, who will, gladly, share their knowledge with you – for free. They say that knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is empowering. 

Historians tell us that Maslow never conceived his hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, with its implications that people must ascend the pyramid one level at a time, meeting their need for love and belonging only after they met their needs for physical survival and security. As always, reality is more nuanced than any graphic representation. 

In a similar way, you don’t have to experience the satisfaction of saving money by repairing your current smartphone before you can change your mindset about consumption. Still, our hope is that you and growing numbers of people experience the “higher” benefits of the Right to Repair, with all of the positive consequences for our lives, communities and environment.

It’s great to be able to fix our stuff. It’s even better to have a healthier relationship with our stuff, one based on care and maintenance over consumption and disposability.