Availability of spare parts and product lifetime in Brazilian consumer protection law

Circular economy, hereinafter 'CE', is high on the political agenda across the globe despite the differences it may assume in the Global South compared with the Global North.In the CE, repair is an important strategy to extend product lifetime.Factors enabling product repair are manifold, including repairability, affordability of repair services, and information to repairers, whether professional ones or consumers themselves.This text discusses one of such enabling factors, namely the availability of spare parts, and how it is regulated by Brazilian law.It does so in comparison to the law of the European Union, hereinafter 'EU'.Differently from some EU ecodesign regulations establishing a fixed minimum period for the availability of spare parts after the placing on the market of the last model of a given product, Brazilian statutory law sets forth that the minimum period should be reasonable and never inferior to product lifetime.Case law, in applying statutory law, determines product lifetime -for the purpose of making spare parts available -in a rather piecemeal fashion.Court decisions are unclear as to whether product lifetime should depend on product use by the consumer or not.Lack of uniformity exists also regarding the criteria or evidence needed to arbitrate product lifetime.It is argued that Brazilian law does not promote product repair, thus running counter to the aim of its National Circular Economy Strategy of creating a regulatory environment favourable to the CE.Legislation should be improved to provide clear, i.e. fixed time frames for the different product categories.