Rising costs revive repair economy

Consumers keep old devices alive as e-waste recycling market forecasts growth

KARACHI:

Pakistan's rising cost of living is giving an old habit a new economic meaning: repair it rather than replace it.

From mobile phones and laptops to air-conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, and other household appliances, consumers are increasingly paying technicians to extend the lives of products once discarded or replaced.

For thousands of technicians, workshop owners and spare-parts dealers, this has created a business built on a simple proposition: when buying new is expensive, keeping the old one working makes better economic sense. But the activity is becoming more than a collection of small repair shops. It is overlapping with refurbishment, used-device trading, component recovery and e-waste recycling.

A 2026 study by 6Wresearch on Pakistan's e-waste recycling market provides a useful picture of this wider value chain. Its publicly available framework tracks component refurbishing alongside precious-metal recovery, plastics separation and battery processing. It covers IT and telecom equipment, consumer devices, appliances and EV components as waste sources.

The report is significant because it places refurbishment between conventional repair and recycling. An ageing device does not necessarily move directly from a consumer's home to a scrap dealer. It can pass through repair, parts replacement, refurbishment, resale and eventual recovery of its remaining materials.

Mobile phones get second life

A mobile technician may replace a damaged screen and return a phone to its owner. Another trader may buy a damaged handset, replace components and sell it as a refurbished device. Spare parts removed from one phone can become useful for another, while phones that cannot be economically repaired may still have value for their components.

The same principle applies to computers and appliances. A laptop with a faulty motherboard, a refrigerator with a damaged compressor or an air-conditioner requiring an expensive component does not become worthless. Technicians can recover usable parts, while traders buy non-working equipment for dismantling and resale.

"Users come to us with all kinds of problems, from slow charging and blank screens to storage issues, broken screens, faulty buttons and damaged charging ports," said Furqan Alvi, a mobile repair shop operator who also sells new devices.

For consumers, a repair bill may be a fraction of the price of a new appliance, particularly when the problem involves a replaceable component rather than the complete product.

Keeping computers alive

The repair market has adapted to changing consumer behaviour. Independent technicians increasingly operate through small workshops, home-based setups and social media pages, using messaging platforms to receive complaints, send repair estimates and arrange doorstep services.

A large number of home-based technicians operate across Karachi. Arshad Awan, who repairs desktop PCs and laptops, communicates with customers through WhatsApp and social media groups.

"People insist on getting their computers repaired for two basic reasons. One is to save their data and, most importantly, to avoid the cost of buying a new machine. They are even reluctant to buy a new adapter for smoother charging," Awan said. He said he could repair PCs and laptops of almost all brands and models. "I communicate through social media groups to find work, and people contact me. Sometimes work comes easily, while at other times I may have to wait for even a month."

Repair, trade and resell

The spare-parts trade forms another layer of this informal economy. Dealers stock new, used and salvaged components, while technicians depend on networks of suppliers to find parts for models no longer supported by manufacturers.

Another growing practice is the exchange of old mobile phones for new ones, with customers paying a relatively small amount to upgrade. The used phones are then resold, allowing older devices to move from one owner to another rather than entering the waste stream. This creates an ecosystem where the value of an old product is not determined only by whether it still works. Its screen, battery, motherboard, compressor, motor or power supply may each have a separate resale value.

For some businesses, the next step is refurbishment

Recently, Commerce Minister Jam Kamal Khan said Samsung had proposed establishing certified mobile-phone refurbishment facilities in Pakistan. The government said a regulated refurbishment ecosystem could strengthen local industry, create employment, build technical expertise and generate opportunities to export refurbished devices.

Samsung also proposed replacing commercial imports of used phones with certified refurbished devices produced through authorised facilities and backed by quality assurance and warranties. The proposal gives a formal-industry dimension to a trade largely developed outside organised manufacturing.

If certified refurbishment facilities emerge, Pakistan could move from importing and repairing used electronics towards repairing and refurbishing devices locally, adding value before resale or export.

The environmental case is equally important

Pakistan's Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination has warned that the country lacks comprehensive baseline data on the scale, sources and handling of e-waste. The ministry said in 2025 that roughly 500,000 tonnes of e-waste are generated annually and that much of it is handled through informal and unsafe channels. It has called for formal collection and recycling systemsand a national framework for e-waste management. The ministry has also noted that discarded mobile phones, computers, televisions and household appliances are often dumped, burned or dismantled informally. At the same time, many products can be reused, refurbished or recycled.

This creates a difficult paradox. The informal repair economy keeps products in use for longer and prevents some equipment from becoming waste, but the same informal system can become environmentally hazardous when products reach the end of their useful lives and are dismantled without proper safeguards.

The opportunity is not simply to formalise every neighbourhood repair shop. It is to connect the different parts of the chain.

A more organised system could allow consumers to hand over unwanted devices, technicians to recover usable components, refurbishers to restore working products and authorised recyclers to recover materials from equipment that can no longer be repaired.

For Pakistan's small businesses, this could turn an activity traditionally viewed as low-end informal work into a more structured service industry. For consumers, it means a broken product can remain useful for longer. For manufacturers, refurbishment could create a new channel for devices that would otherwise enter the used market without quality controls. And for the environment, every additional year that a repairable product remains in use delays its journey into the waste stream.

The 6Wresearch study forecasts Pakistan's e-waste recycling market through 2032, covering component refurbishing, recycling and recovery activities as the sector develops into a broader commercial value chain. The repair economy may therefore be telling a bigger story about Pakistan's consumption pattern: as replacement becomes harder to afford, the country is learning to extract more value from the products it already owns.

What began as a neighbourhood technician fixing a broken phone or appliance could eventually become part of a larger circular economy – one in which the first business is repair, the next is refurbishment, and the final value lies in recovering whatever remains.