Positive Impact: The growing movement of ‘repair-don’t-replace’

This article first appeared in Mix Interiors #228

A circular economy is defined by the European Parliament as “a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible”. Now many brands and designers are endorsing one of these strands – repairing – as part of a widespread rejection of the linear economy, traditionally based on a take-make-waste approach that is ravaging the planet’s finite resources.

The repair-don’t-replace philosophy has echoes of Make Do and Mend, the World War II pamphlet encouraging British citizens to darn and alter clothes in the face of rationing, save that the latter sprang from economic not ecological expediency. By contrast, in post-war America profligacy (and by extension waste) was encouraged: in 1955, Life magazine coined the phrase “throwaway living” – heedless consumerism – a positive term. It took sceptics such as Vance Packard, American author of ‘The Waste Makers’ (1960), to draw attention to planned obsolescence. The hippie counterculture’s clarion calls against wasteful consumerism in the 1970s – particularly in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis – served as another wake-up call, matched today by mounting evidence of the consequences of climate change, from rising sea levels to droughts.