Planned obsolescence in the context of a holistic legal sphere

Abstract

Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Businesses may take advantage of the rapid technological developments to increase sales by designing products with a short lifespan and encouraging consumers to buy a replacement more quickly than they otherwise might have to, which is commonly known as planned obsolescence. While employing a holistic approach and exploring planned obsolescence from three different angles, such as demand-side, supply-side and environmental-side, the paper argues that the current measures in the fields of unfair competition and consumer protection law, competition law, and environmental law are quite insufficient to deal with planned obsolescence. Therefore, there is the need for an EU measure outlawing planned obsolescence in the context of the circular economy.