Over the course of the 20th century, with the gradual emergence of the “throw-away” culture, especially in the wealthier regions of the world, people began to attach less and less importance to the concept of repair. It often became cheaper to purchase new products than to refurbish or maintain existing ones. Consequently, the necessity for repairs is no longer considered essential, and the time and effort invested in it have declined alongside the rise of mass production of consumer goods.
‘Repair culture’ is a key practical element of the Circular Economy. It focuses on extending product lifecycles in order to reduce the need for new production as well as resource consumption and waste. Furthermore, the field of repair has the potential to play a significant role in people’s lives, fostering self-empowerment and community building.
This article by researcher Sára Katica Bíbor focuses on how repair culture could play a more central role in socio-ecological change than is often assumed, and how it is influenced by regulations, trends, levels of environmental awareness, and cultural norms. It highlights the potential of community-based initiatives, such as “Do-it-yourself” and “Do-it-together” movements, as well as Repair Cafés. Moreover, it examines current policy interventions, discusses key barriers to the wider uptake of repair, and illustrates how repair could challenge existing consumption and production patterns using selected examples.
Introduction
How can repair culture be strengthened, and what existing practices support, or hinder its wider adoption? To address these questions, this article first provides an overview of the phenomenon itself. Repair culture prioritises longevity and repair over disposability of objects to promote a sustainable lifestyle. It represents a key socio-cultural phenomenon, connected to debates on sustainability and consumption. In today’s accelerated, consumerist society, the revival of repair culture may be crucial for environmentally sustainable transformation (Zapata Campos et al., 2020).
According to the European Parliament, 77% of EU citizens would prefer to repair products rather than replace them if they had the necessary skills to do so, or if repair services were more affordable and easier to access. As a result, an estimated 35 million tonnes of waste are generated each year in the EU from products that could technically still be repaired.
A study by the European Environmental Bureau found that household products are replaced 11.9 years earlier on average than their minimum optimal lifespan for climate goals would indicate. The report calculates that if the lifespan of these four product types were extended by just one year across the EU, it would save approximately 4 MtCO2 annually until 2030, the equivalent of taking over 2 million cars off the roads for a year.
Repair Culture as a Value System
Examining repair culture from a psychological perspective reveals that the act of repairing can strengthen the user’s attachment to objects, their perceived value, and foster a sense of positive nostalgia (e.g., vintage fashion), as opposed to simply discarding them. In addition to encouraging user responsibility, repair can also serve as a form of resistance to the growing dominance of planned obsolescence by slowing down rapid product cycles and enabling individuals to extend the lifespan of their possessions. In this sense, repair can be understood as a practice through which individuals reclaim a degree of control over consumption.
Repair can be a powerful tool for developing emotional connections to objects. These connections can motivate individuals to make long-term efforts to repair items, moving away from a “consumer” mindset to become a “caretaker”. Repairing items is an effective way to enhance skills, transition away from passive consumption, and strengthen the sense of agency. This enables individuals to care for both their belongings and themselves.
The repair ethos, as an alternative way of valuing objects, frames repair as not merely a technical practice but as a distinct value system centred on care, longevity, and preservation. Repair refers to the act of fixing faults, mending broken objects, and restoring old items, whereas maintenance is a foreseeable and routine activity that must be carried out at regular intervals. Both, however, serve the same purpose: extending the lifespan of things. Repair and maintenance may function more effectively than recycling, which is also considered an environmentally conscious approach, because in the recycling process, the object itself is lost, whereas the advantage of repair and maintenance lies precisely in preserving the thing’s “thing-ness”.
Policy interventions: the ‘right to repair’ and incentives
Environmental policymakers primarily try to grasp the path to sustainability at the end-of-life stage, focusing on recycling, even though encouraging repair can be a better alternative in several respects.
The 10R framework (ranging from R0 to R9), which builds on the waste hierarchy defined by the European Parliament and Council Directive, is inspired by circular economy principles. It aims to minimise the use of natural resources by prioritising more sustainable strategies. Within this hierarchy, repair is placed at R4, indicating it as a relatively environmentally friendly option. It precedes recycling (R8) and several other strategies, as it requires significantly less energy and fewer resources than processes such as breaking products down into raw materials.
Unfortunately, alongside the user side, the manufacturing side of products cannot be excluded from the equation. Increasing supply and profit generally have a greater influence on products than sustainability aspects, and planned obsolescence is often designed into products. More recently, environmentally oriented product policies have an increasing influence on manufacturers’ practices, placing greater emphasis on environmental considerations and aiming to extend product lifespans through regulatory measures.
One such initiative is the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan, which, grounded in the principles of the circular economy, promotes the reuse, repair, and recycling of products and materials. Within this, the Sustainable Product Policy Framework requires that products placed on the EU market be designed to be more durable, reusable, repairable, and energy-efficient, that is, designed with circularity in mind. In addition, it focuses on empowering consumers and public buyers, which aims to provide consumers with the appropriate durability and repairability of products, and to have better recourse when a product is faulty. This is the “right to repair”.
The goal of the “right to repair” is to require manufacturers to provide more support and make it easier for consumers to repair their own products. The right-to-repair legislation would understandably hurt manufacturer profit, but it is less clear how manufacturers would adjust product prices and redesign product durability in an attempt to mitigate the inevitable profit loss once the bill is enacted, and what the welfare and environmental implications are.
Another example of policy incentives is the French “repair bonus,” which is financed by fees from extended producer responsibility schemes. It aims to finance clothing and shoe repairs through a bonus that reduces the repair cost for consumers. The repair bonus is designed to encourage people to repair rather than purchase new products and, at the same time, to increase the visibility of reliable repairers through a network of labelled repairers. The two main criticisms of this otherwise useful initiative are the limited public awareness and the limited willingness to use the bonus.
Other sources, however, speak very positively about these types of initiatives. In France, for example, more than 165,000 repairs were carried out under the repair bonus scheme for electrical and electronic equipment within the first year of its introduction. Similarly, in Austria, over 840,000 repair vouchers have been issued since the introduction of the repair voucher scheme. Overall, consumers respond very positively to these measures, as several reports indicate.
Insights from behavioural sciences help policymakers develop more effective policies to promote well-being and sustainable behaviour. Nevertheless, information campaigns remain the most widely used policy tool for promoting sustainable consumption. For policymaking, it would seem strongly desirable to have a better understanding of the contested dimensions of repair and underlying differences and diverging orientations: mobilising repair through mechanisms that focus on instrumental value, such as product service offerings, or tax breaks for repair, might therefore be less effective than engaging with deeper motivations, even if presented to support environmental sustainability (Cavallo et al., 2025).
Social and cultural dimensions: the role of community improvement
Approaching the topic from a social and cultural direction reveals additional factors that may spur individuals toward repair. From a policymaking perspective, for instance, it could be forward-looking to not only encourage people toward repair with various incentives, but also to increase their deeper motivation for environmental sustainability. This involves empowering them to use their right to repair and triggering their “commitment to action”.
With the emergence of community-based repair initiatives, repair culture began to flourish. The emergence of maker spaces and Repair Cafés makes repair a cultural practice and turns it into a collective stand against consumerism. Beyond the strong, attractive power of community, it can also be practical due to its inclusive atmosphere, its nature as a social activity, and its skill-sharing segment. However, repair (and reuse) can be seen as an element of an emerging eco-consumer habit associated with affluent social groups and paralleled by urban gentrification. Paradoxically, these groups have historically contributed significantly to the decline of repair culture throughout the 20th century. Anti-consumerism, sustainability, and anti-waste values may appear to be in harmony; however, repair practices can also stimulate additional consumption, for example, through the purchase of tools or spare parts. The commodification of the impulse to repair, and its use for marketing purposes, is therefore a predictable response from businesses. Moreover, the framing of repair as a “fashionable activity” can further expand consumer markets for tools and equipment. In contrast, alternatives such as tool libraries and shared repair spaces may mitigate these effects by reducing the need for individual ownership and associated spending (Cavallo et al., 2025).
Another increasingly popular concept within repair culture is the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement. This has three important pillars (Krebs & Weber, 2021): The first is an ethical orientation that emphasises environmental sustainability and challenges consumer capitalism, promoting values such as subsistence, participation, and post-growth. The second is the sharing of things (“Do-It-Together” or DIT, as part of DIY), and the third is broad access to repair knowledge, promoted by the Internet as a digital commons that makes knowledge once held by a few available to everyone. A prominent example of this is Bike Kitchens, which are mostly run by volunteers and operate as non-profit organisations. These are places where people teach each other how to repair and refurbish bicycles. One of the first such Bike Kitchens was established in Vienna in the 1980s.
Another inspiring example of the DIT movement is Repair Cafés, which are key contributors to the circular economy, strengthening sustainability and community collaboration. These Repair Cafés serve as community hubs where people from various backgrounds can develop their skills and share good practices and tricks with each other.
When discussing the DIY movement, as opposed to the DIT movement, it is important to mention that effective repair practices for almost any item can now be found online, offering step-by-step guidance on how to fix individual products, providing assistance, and representing a major step toward making repair more affordable.
Limitations to the spread of a repair culture
From a policymaking perspective, it is important to recognise that the effectiveness of incentives, for example, tax breaks for repaired products, can be limited if there is a lack of user motivation to be environmentally conscious. This necessitates informing consumers and raising greater awareness of sustainability, a requirement that well-targeted policy alone does not fully address. Currently, adherence to anti-waste values remains a “fashionable activity” largely confined to certain segments of society, and it has yet to become widespread.
In addition to this, the price of new products has decreased significantly, while the cost of repair services and labour has increased. Consequently, buying a new product is often cheaper than repairing an existing one. This is a significant factor contributing to the observed decline in repair activity.
As mentioned earlier, planned obsolescence is one of the most limiting factors of repair. The main issue is not only that products are deliberately designed to fail quickly, but also that their repairability is often heavily restricted (Bisschop, Hendlin, & Jaspers, 2022). The most commonly known example of planned obsolescence is the case of the light bulb, whose lifespan was decreased between 1924 and 1940 from 2,500 to 1,000 working hours. However, planned obsolescence is also commonly used in the market of consumer electronics, such as phones, laptops, and washing machines.
The incentive for manufacturers to maximise profits often leads them to accelerate product replacement cycles, which runs counter to long-term sustainability goals. This underscores the need for effective regulatory intervention (such as the right to repair legislation already mentioned) to influence manufacturing behaviour. The prioritisation of short-term profit over product longevity and repairability presents a systemic economic challenge.
If a product is properly and professionally refurbished, it is often difficult to distinguish it from a new one. However, when analysing DIY or DIT movements, the necessary expertise, attention, and patience are often lacking. Conversely, in the case of professional repair services, the cost of repair itself can pose a barrier. Overall, there are still significant challenges to overcome before a repair culture can be widely adopted.
Conclusion
The revival of a culture of repair is essential for strengthening sustainable lifestyles and the circular economy. The essay has shown that while policy instruments such as the European Union’s “right to repair” initiatives and national repair bonuses are promising, lasting success lies in combating premature obsolescence and fundamentally changing consumer attitudes.
Community-based (Repair Café, Bike Kitchen) and online DIY movements provide easier access to repair knowledge and skills, thereby helping consumers to adopt a more “caring” role. Although current constraints (costs of repair, lack of awareness) slow down the process, the growing ethical and social value of repair indicates the potential for the culture to strengthen in the future.
At the same time, the future of repair culture raises broader questions in the field of socio-ecological policy and governance. These include the feasibility of global regulatory frameworks aimed at preventing unsustainable corporate practices and the extent to which growing consumer awareness of sustainability can replace or complement official regulation. It is clear that further research and policy development are required to explore the interaction between global regulation and awareness-raising.
Article by Sára Katica Bíbor
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