One of the biggest benefits of a legal right to repair our stuff is that it creates the conditions by which individuals can extend the useful life of…well…everything. By making information, software, and parts available, right to repair empowers owners of “stuff” to not drag said stuff out to the curb to be “recycled.” (Not coincidentally, this will also save families lots of money!)

As we have long suspected, but now know, “recycling” is really a misnomer. Consider the recent experiment conducted in New Zealand in which miniature GPS tracking devices were affixed to small electronics and home appliances that were returned to retail outlets. Despite (some) promises that returned electronics were recycled, the GPS trackers revealed that almost all ended up in landfills. “We now live in a world where nearly new appliances, and all the embedded resources contained in them and used to produce them can be thrown straight into a hole in the ground at the first sign of fault,” said Paul Smith, the Head of Testing at Consumer New Zealand.

And for all the chest thumping of companies like Apple about its programs to encourage users to turn in old hardware for “recycling,” the fact is that discarded phones and laptops contain only trace amounts of valuable metals, while the cost of retrieving those from the discarded device in an environmentally responsible manner (note: we distinguish those from the morally and environmentally irresponsible e-waste recycling efforts) outweighs the value of the extracted materials. The result: the vast majority of material contained in recycled electronics like iPhones and laptops ends up..you guessed it…in landfills. Repair strikes at the heart of that by pushing the broad population of consumers to practice the best, most environmentally friendly form of “recycling,” namely: reuse.

Of course, this problem of “throwaway culture” goes far beyond recycled electronics. There’s also the endemic problem of “single use” plastics like water bottles and the “clamshell containers” that crowd supermarket shelves and then, invariably, end up in the waste stream or polluting our rivers and oceans. Check out this article in the New York Times about one man’s Quixotic effort to clean up Buffalo Bayou in Houston in the face of a tsunami of plastic waste.

So for this Friday’s “Repair Chat,” I ask you to share a postcard from our “culture of waste.” This could be examples from your own community of rampant “throwaway-ism” as well as its opposite - instances where we’re “doing better” and fighting that instinct to drag it to the curb.

I’ll start with a positive example, which is a local Facebook group for my community, Everything is Free Belmont, which is a well trafficked group for residents of my home town where folks post photos of stuff that is free for the taking. They range from ubiquitous kids toys and old clothes to electronics, gardening supplies to canned goods and vegetables or (in this case) excess packaging.

We talk about the tremendous problems that social media platforms have caused but, in other ways, they have been considerable forces for good and this is a great example of that - a Facebook group that is encouraging “circular economy” practices like re-use and sharing vs. “use it and lose it.”