Rethinking Repairability: How Reliable Are Today’s Product Repair Scorecards?

As societies pursue circular economy goals, product reparability has emerged as a critical sustainability issue. Scoring systems that quantify how easy it is to repair consumer products—such as smartphones, vacuum cleaners, and televisions—play a vital role in shaping design standards, informing policy, and guiding consumer choices [2,3]. A recent study by Dangal et al. [3] critically assessed the reliability and validity of four widely used scoring systems: the French Reparability Index (FRI), the Joint Research Centre system (JRC), iFixit, and Austria’s ONR19202.