Marissa Heffernan, Resource-Recycling.com, January 31, 2025

The momentum behind consumer electronics right-to-repair bills that has been building since 2021 doesn’t seem to be ebbing, with 10 bills introduced so far this year and supporters anticipating far more to come.

Over the past several years, California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York and Oregon all have enacted consumer electronics right-to-repair laws, which generally require OEMs to make available to independent repair shops and consumers the parts, tools and documentation needed to fix covered devices.

Oregon and Colorado’s laws also ban the use of software to ensure a device will only operate with specific individual parts, called parts pairing.

Liz Chamberlain, director of sustainability and head of the right to repair advocacy team at iFixit, said the right to repair is “continuing to take off,” and not just in consumer electronics – among wheelchairs, farm equipment and digital items, 49 out of 50 states have filed some kind of right-to-repair bill over the past several years. Wisconsin is the only state that hasn’t.

“The train is rolling, the balls are rolling, everything is rolling,” Chamberlain said. “We wondered if, given that we have passed it in five states, we would start to see things kind of ramp down, and instead we’re seeing the opposite.”

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, said she’s tracking 25 states introducing bills for a variety of products.

“It’s crazy right now,” she said. “Bills are being filed all over the place.”

And “each state that passes a bill makes it easier for the next state to pass a bill,” she added.

Lawmaking approach varies by state

In terms of legislation, 10 bills touching specifically on the right to repair consumer electronics have been introduced so far this year.

Legislators in Connecticut introduced HB 6053, which at this stage is a single-page bill stating that the “general statutes be amended to provide consumers and independent repair providers with the ability to repair consumer electronics.”

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