Right to repair and product passports take effect across the EU
Two long-prepared rules land within days of each other this July, turning reparability and disassembly data from a selling point into a legal default across the single market.
Repair becomes the default
The EU Right to Repair Directive becomes applicable from 31 July 2026, the deadline by which member states must have written it into national law. It obliges manufacturers to repair a defined list of products even after the warranty has expired — among them phones, tablets, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators and electronic displays — extends the guarantee by a year on goods that are repaired, and stands up a Europe-wide online platform to connect owners with repairers and spare-parts sellers. Repair stops being the awkward exception and starts being the expected path.
Every product carries its own record
Alongside it, the EU's central Digital Product Passport registry is due to go live on 19 July 2026 — the master index that will eventually hold a passport for each regulated product. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), those passports carry the information that makes reversibility possible: how durable a product is, how to take it apart, how much recycled content it holds, and how to reuse or recycle it at end of life. The first ESPR rules target iron and steel in 2026, with textiles, aluminium, tyres and furniture following.
Read together, the two measures attack irreversibility from both ends — a right to keep a product in service, and the data needed to disassemble and remake it when its service finally ends.
Source
See the European Commission on the Right to Repair Directive and on implementing the ESPR; background on the registry launch via Circularise.