Why circular hardware needs its own rules, and why those rules must be global.
By Laili Ishaqzai
Borders look neat on a map. They define who trades with whom, who pays which tax, and whose standards apply. But the climate doesn’t recognise them. The atmosphere doesn’t care about paperwork, legislation or customs codes, it simply registers the physical outcome of our decisions. And those decisions, whether made in Europe or elsewhere, are now tightly interwoven.
Globalisation and the open economy were built to move goods efficiently and create wealth. Today, it must exist to make us more sustainable. The same open economy that connected our markets should now connect our responsibilities. Because the truth is simple: choices made in one place determine the quality of life in another.
Nowhere is this interdependence clearer than in consumer electronics. There are more mobile phones than people on Earth. Consumer electronics have become the world’s nervous system. On every continent, a phone or laptop is no longer a luxury but a gateway to education, payments, administration and safety. Yet drawers and warehouses hold idle devices while factories continue to run. We overproduce and underuse on a warming planet that cannot absorb that pattern.
Most of that cost occurs long before the device is ever turned on. Studies from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the industry itself show that 70–90% of a smartphone’s total CO₂ emissions occur during production, in the extraction of raw materials, component manufacturing, and assembly. Every additional year of use substantially reduces that footprint. In other words: reuse, repair and refurbishment are not side activities, they are the single most effective climate strategy in our sector.
This logic is also reflected in global guidance. The UNEP International Resource Panel and the IPCC’s AR6 report find that material reuse, repair, refurbishment and life-extension can deliver 20–30% of the emissions reductions needed in industrial sectors by 2050. Keeping existing products working is not a niche intervention; it is a major lever for meeting climate targets.
And yet, we continue to regulate reused electronics as if they were simply “new products, but later.” In Europe, a refurbished or imported second-hand device is legally treated as a first placement on the market, bound by the same compliance rules as a brand-new one. Requirements written for innovation and new design, CE marking, charging-port standards, even private copying levies, are extended to goods that already exist. The result is absurd: in the name of safety and uniformity, we obstruct the very practices that could cut emissions fastest.
This is not about removing regulation, but about recognising a different category. Circular hardware is not a by-product of the new. It is an entirely separate class of product, with different risks, different value chains, and a different purpose. To treat it under the same rulebook as new production is like applying male medical data to women’s health and assuming it fits, a mistake that delayed progress for decades. It became clear that women are not “smaller men,” and that data must fit the patient if outcomes are to improve. Folding circular hardware into frameworks designed for innovation cycles builds a climate penalty into compliance.
Once we acknowledge the category, governance becomes practical. The task is not to squeeze reuse into a rulebook that was never meant to host it, but to write rules that let trust travel with a device: verifiable data erasure, clear and portable grading, serial traceability that customs and after-sales systems can actually use, and warranties that accompany the product and are honoured across borders. None of this weakens safety or consumer protection; it strengthens both by aligning them with physics and with how supply chains actually operate.
Because production footprints, supply chains and secondary markets are global, national or even regional fixes will always be partial. We will not reach climate goals with policies that stop at the water’s edge. The open economy that once accelerated consumption must now be directed toward slowing production, by allowing high-quality secondhand equipment to flow where it is needed. Rather than tripping, overrules written for brand-new goods and then copy pasted onto goods that already exist.
That shift is structural, not rhetorical. It asks us to treat circular hardware as infrastructure; to design for longevity and redeployment; and to make the economics of second lives predictable enough for investors, public buyers and households to rely on them. It also asks something simpler and harder: to remember that the bureaucracy we have built is not a law of nature, and to change it when it no longer serves the outcomes we claim to value.
At Molano, we work from that premise: building the practical scaffolding that keeps equipment in productive use and makes reuse commercially sensible instead of exceptional. And because words only matter when they meet practice, I will join the panel “The International Secondary Market for Reselling IT Equipment” at RetechDays Business Europe to push this agenda with peers across regions. If we recognise circular hardware as its own category and write rules to match, borders will not be barriers; they will be the routes through which solutions travel.