Consumer NZ wants to put "repairability labels" on products and appliances, with the watchdog saying many Kiwis send easy-to-repair products straight to landfill instead of fixing them.
New Zealanders currently throw out about 97,000 tonnes of unwanted or broken electrical waste each year.
Consumer NZ has started a petition aiming to "put the pressure back on manufacturers to do better".
"Show them you want products you can repair, and help us demand a mandatory repairability label," the watchdog urged. "If we can shop based on how long products will last and how repairable they are, manufacturers and retailers will be forced to lift their game."
The organisation's head of testing Paul Smith told Breakfast this morning: "This is the time when everything's on sale, right?
"Everything's trying to convince us to buy new stuff."
But he urged people to look at the things they have already, instead of dumping and replacing them.
"In a lot of cases, the phones that we're replacing – if we're talking about phones – are perfectly good for what we need," Smith explained. "New phones are not that much better or better at all than phones from the last three or four years.
"The second thing is, think about the entire life of that phone, not just what you need right now. Look for something that is going to be durable and repairable because eventually, the battery or the screen is gonna break, and you're gonna need to fix it."
GoodTech director Fraser Webb said people don't realised phones can be easily repaired.
"People think that, just because the battery or a button [is broken], let's get a new one," he said.
"But actually... these things should be able to last a really, really long time."
Webb also echoed Consumer NZ's call for more work from manufacturers.
He said the hardware is getting better but companies need to make sure older devices support new software as well. And Webb said it's "crazy" that some companies try to discourage repairs or using third-party repairers.
Smith said our laws are "pretty lax" on manufacturers blocking consumers from repairing products – by threatening to void warranties if a third-party repair service is used, for example.
"We need to do better on that count," he said, adding larger products like whiteware tend to be repaired more often.
"There's still that market for people repairing those, although it's not as big as it used to be.
"The small appliances, if you look at small kitchen appliances, we pretty much treat all of those as disposable.
"There's still demand to repair this stuff, we've just been sort of trained to think that's not an option so much anymore."
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