The finding
On 30 September 2026 University of Surrey researchers published a study in Business Strategy and the Environment (DOI 10.1002/bse.70789). It compares what happens to broken electronics in two parts of the British system. The team analysed 10,678 UK Repair Café records and made site visits to the Slyfield Recycling Centre and a Repair Café in Guildford. Surrey's release reports that only about 2% to 2.5% of devices seen at the municipal recycling centre were judged suitable for reuse. At Repair Cafés, 50% of items were successfully repaired and a further 28% were potentially repairable.
The two figures come from different settings, so they are not a controlled comparison. A device that someone carries to a Repair Café has already been selected by an owner who hopes it can be saved. A device in a recycling-centre skip has been selected for disposal. The study does not show that 78% of everything thrown away is fixable. It does show that the system's default routing sends devices with remaining life straight to materials recovery, and that nobody along the way is asked whether they could be fixed.
The lead author, Sheeba Pathak, put it this way in the release: "Too many electrical products are treated as waste before anyone has properly considered whether they can be repaired." The paper also finds that most products in the sample became obsolete within four to eight years, and that mobile phones lasted about four and a half years.
The strongest case for tougher mandates
The case for stronger intervention is a fair one. Repair is a market with a structural problem: the party that designs a product (and often controls parts, tools and software) captures little of the benefit when the product lasts longer. Independent repairers and volunteers absorb the cost of reverse-engineering. Consumers lack the information to price repairability at the point of sale. If voluntary action were enough, the recycling-centre figure would not be so low. The Surrey authors say as much: "relying on goodwill alone will not solve Britain's electronic waste problem."
What Britain's rules actually cover
Great Britain's headline repair rules are the Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information Regulations 2021 (SI 2021/745), made on 18 June 2021 and mostly in force from 1 July 2021. They work product by product, and the parts requirements attach to categories such as washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerating appliances and electronic displays. Which? has described the rules as omitting a long list of common household goods, including laptops and smartphones, and its reporting did not show any change in that position. The two product categories in the Surrey data that matter most for the digital economy, phones and laptops, therefore sit outside the mandated parts-and-information regime.
The regulations also commit the government to evaluate them and publish reports on whether to amend them, with deadlines set by product group, for example 25 December 2024 for electronic displays and 14 November 2025 for electric motors. That review machinery exists. Extending it to portable computing devices is a political choice, not a legal obstacle.
Where a proportionate approach lands
The Surrey findings point to a cheaper first step than a sweeping new product mandate. Three of the study's recommendations stand out:
- Treat community repair as infrastructure. The authors want recycling centres to act as coordination hubs that route products to repair, maker spaces or specialist processors, weighing cost, carbon and processing time. This is a logistics change that a local authority can pilot without waiting for primary legislation.
- Fund and recognise repairers formally. The paper calls for formal recognition, funding and skills support for community repair organisations, which currently run largely on volunteer time.
- Use producer-financed collection and take-back duties. Making producers and online marketplaces pay for end-of-life handling gives them a reason to design for repair, without the regulator having to specify the design.
There are risks. Parts and information mandates for phones and laptops need careful scoping, because security-critical components, water-resistance and thin form factors involve real engineering trade-offs. A rule that forces manufacturers to release firmware keys or diagnostic tools without safeguards could create security problems for users. Equally, a mandate that applies only to the largest firms can entrench them if compliance costs fall hardest on smaller hardware makers. Evidence-based regulation here means setting information and parts-availability duties first, measuring how repair rates and device lifespans respond, and tightening only if they do not move.
Nor should the study be oversold. The authors modelled costs, waiting times, staffing and copper recovery, and they say better routing could reduce business costs and emissions. That is a modelling result built on one recycling centre and one café in Guildford, plus a national dataset of café records. It is a strong argument for pilots and data collection. It is not yet proof that national rollout would deliver the same savings.
What to watch
The practical test is whether the UK government uses its existing review process to look at portable electronics, and whether waste authorities adopt the "route to repair first" model that the Surrey team describes. Neither requires banning anything or prescribing how devices are built. If the 50% repair rate at cafés is even partly replicable at scale, the argument for treating repair as a normal part of waste handling is strong, and a light-touch approach would be enough to start.