Goodbye to the repairability index, and make way for the "sustainability index" for televisions. Starting this Wednesday, January 8, you will find a new rating attached to the prices of TV screens, whether online or in store. Next to the energy label, the sustainability index will allow you to quickly gauge access to repair and spare parts for a product, using a rating from 1 to 10 and a color code. It replaces and complements the’index of repairability which had been used since 2021, and which applied to nine products (including televisions).
The new index now includes criteria of repairability and especially of reliability, elements on which the consumer can base themselves to know “the more or less durable nature, understood in the sense of the lifespan, of their purchases of electrical or electronic products” of a product, details the website of the Ministry of the Economy.
The durability index is the average of three scores:
- a score of repairability: this involves measuring access to technical documentation, ease of disassembly, availability and price of spare parts (at the time of sale).
- a reliability rating, the aim of which is to measure over time "resistance to constraints and wear" - this criterion is new: it was not taken into account in the previous index, the repairability index. Are maintenance and servicing accessible, is there a commercial guarantee and a quality process?
- a rating for improvement - updating - of the devices.
Red, orange, yellow or green
The higher the score, the longer a product will last over time. The sustainability index follows the codes of its predecessor, the repairability index, with a color code ranging from red to green: the greener the label, the more sustainable a product will be considered.
This Wednesday morning, we took a quick look at online sales sites. While some played the game, others were not yet up to date with the new regulations – they were still displaying the old repairability indices.
Smartphones excluded from the system, at the request of Brussels
Next to the index, a link to an explanatory note should allow consumers to understand how it was calculated. For the moment, only televisions are concerned: washing machines will follow next April. Next up – the date is yet to be determined – will be vacuum cleaners, electric lawnmowers, dishwashers and high-pressure cleaners.
But for the HOP (Halte à l’obsolescence programmée) association, the list should be extended to many other consumer devices, it declared in a press release published on Tuesday, January 7.
For smartphones, we will have to wait until June 2025 and the future energy labeling defined by Brussels. Telephones have in fact been excluded from the system, at the request of the European Commission, which feared that the French index would conflict with the future European index, less restrictive on certain points according to defenders of a right to repair.
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