We produce around two billion tonnes of waste each year globally. When materials end up in landfill, incinerators, or littered on our roadsides, it’s not just the material that is wasted, but an entire ecosystem of potential jobs and services.
This unharnessed industry would help to keep a huge amount of value in our economy that is currently squandered. In 2022 we wasted £47 billion worth of recoverable materials from electronic waste alone - and this figure is only growing, with e-waste now the fastest growing waste stream in the world.
Fast fashion and fast tech offer cheap and disposable products with short lifespans but big environmental and social costs.
Every year, Earth Overshoot Day marks the moment when we have used more resources than the earth can regenerate in a single year. This year, it fell on its earliest date of August 1st.
This shows that we need to move away from our linear model of take, make, waste, and instead towards a circular economic model which enables materials and their value to remain in the economy and replace demand for virgin materials.
This unlocks business opportunities for those able to collect, sort, repair, refurbish, rebuild, restore, recycle, and redistribute it. This means making products that are designed to be reused and repaired, not ones that are easy to throw away and replace. In order to encourage more consumers to repair their items, it needs to be more convenient and accessible to do so. This can be achieved through the expansion of the ‘right to repair’ regulations.
Everyone in the UK has the ‘right to repair’ large home appliances like dishwashers, fridges and televisions. Commonly available tools and manufacturers are guaranteed access to spare parts and repair documentation for citizens and third party repair companies.
But it needs to be easier for consumers to repair more of their goods. We should extend the right to repair regulations to cover smaller electronic goods, like phones.
For every one new mobile phone in the UK, there are four unused. Within each unused device there are valuable metals like lithium, silver and copper. It’s estimated that there is a copper mine worth £266 million stashed away in our collective drawers across the country. As well as preventing the damage caused by virgin mineral and metal extraction, there is also a lost economic opportunity caused by smaller e-waste. Expanding the right to repair regulation to a wider range of products will therefore help empower consumers to repair more of their devices and prevent these valuable materials from being wasted.
Unsustainably using up our Earth's precious resources can cause huge stress on the environment and society. It is imperative that we do better to conserve our natural resources but we must also recognise the opportunities that can be created in doing so. The circular economy offers huge potential to create jobs and retain wealth through a burgeoning repair sector and all the logistics and infrastructure that comes with it. By expanding the right to repair, consumers can lead the way and help to unlock an exciting layer of our economy which is currently going to waste.
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