From 19 July, it has been illegal in the European Union to destroy unsold clothing, accessories and footwear. That date is worth pinning down, because it belongs to the first product list to fall under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, in force since 18 July 2024 — the framework that replaced the old energy-only Ecodesign Directive (2009/125/EC) and now claims jurisdiction over the durability, repairability and recyclability of virtually every physical product sold in the single market, with the destruction-ban list set to be revised every 36 months.

Two months later, the Norwegian Consumer Council’s “Short Life” campaign is sitting near the top of Hacker News, at 335 comments and climbing. Which is to say: the regulatory moment and the public mood have arrived together. Everyone has drawn the same conclusion. Manufacturers make junk, and quality should be the norm again.

That conclusion is right about the symptom and wrong about the mechanism. The thing that shortened the working life of most of the objects in your house over the past decade was not a hinge, a sole, or a solder joint. It was a date — an end-of-support notice, a firmware cutoff, a part only the factory can pair to the board. Quality stopped being a property of an object and became a promise about the future. And a regulatory apparatus built to inspect objects is now pointed at a problem made of time.

The Part That Wore Out Was a Calendar

Go stand at the returns desk of any electronics retailer and ask what generates the trade-in. It isn’t cracked glass. It’s the moment the device stops getting updates, or the moment the app that made it useful moves to a subscription tier.

“We get maybe two questions a month about how long a device will be supported,” said the person who runs warranty and returns at a Nordic electronics reseller, in a Slack message she fired off halfway through a Tuesday compliance webinar. “We get forty about whether we can knock three hundred kroner off the price.”

That isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an information problem, and it’s structural. Durability is a counterfactual: you cannot test in the shop whether the thing will still be receiving security patches in 2031. Warranty law, meanwhile, is anchored to the moment of sale — the defect you can prove, inside the window you’re given. That was a fine instrument for a world of physical failure. It is close to useless in a world of orderly withdrawal.

A Passport With No Date Field

The centerpiece of the new regime is the Digital Product Passport: a per-product data record covering durability, repairability, energy efficiency and environmental disclosure, as the compliance guides now proliferating around it summarize. Read that list again. Nowhere on it is the one attribute a buyer would actually pay for — the date on which the manufacturer intends to stop supporting the thing.

In a passport, durability becomes a field in a database. Someone has to define it, which means a testing protocol, which means the manufacturer, or the lab it hired, fills in the number. Repairability scoring has the same shape: a rating you can engineer against cheaply, by shipping screws instead of glue and declaring the problem solved.

And then the part the framework’s authors will not enjoy hearing. Compliance paperwork carries a fixed cost, and fixed costs are always paid most easily by the largest firms. The secondhand seller, the independent repair shop, the eleven-person European brand — they inherit the documentation burden without inheriting any market power. That isn’t an argument against the regulation. It’s an argument that a durability regime built from dossiers and audits will end up certifying durability rather than producing it.

The 19 July destruction ban is the purest example. It stops a genuinely absurd practice — shredding and burning unsold inventory — and does precisely nothing about how long the sold inventory lasts. Symbolic regulation of the visible sin, while the invisible one keeps running.

The Market Isn’t the Answer Either, and That’s the Problem

Here is the reflex on my side of the aisle: if people wanted durable goods, someone would sell them. It’s a good reflex, and it fails here for a specific reason. Durability claims are claims a seller makes about its own future behavior.

No competitor has an incentive to print “supported until March 2029” on the box if the plan is to quietly stop in 2027. The resale market does price obsolescence — three years after you needed to know. And a support cutoff isn’t a defect you can sue over. It’s a business decision, announced once, absorbed as a cost of doing business, and never entered into any ledger the buyer can consult.

So “just buy better” is not a market solution. It is an instruction to acquire information that no seller is obliged to produce and no buyer can verify.

Which leaves an odd conclusion. The cheapest and most market-compatible fix available is a label: a mandated, at-point-of-sale disclosure of the support end date, and nothing else. No design mandate. No testing protocol. No dossier. Just a date, printed where the price is printed, next to the warranty terms nobody reads.

That would vindicate the Norwegian Consumer Council’s instinct while leaving the Brussels framework looking heavy for no reason. It would also force the free-market commentariat to concede that markets clear on information, and that this particular information has been withheld by everyone and supplied by no one. Both sides would have to give something up, which is the only kind of policy that tends to survive contact with reality.

Quality as a norm is a fine slogan. But you don’t get there by demanding better steel. You get there by making someone write down the date.

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