Circular Repair: Turning Waste into Value

Why don’t more people repair their electronics? It's a simple question that Chris Stretton asked himself, but finding an answer wasn’t simple at all. He started with 687 research articles on barriers to electronics repair. After narrowing down to 64 key studies and interviewing 11 experts, he identified more than 100 factors that influence whether someone repairs a product... or doesn’t. Eventually, he distilled them into 10 main factors across the four stages of the repair process:

Attitude → Intention → Action → Learning

Among the big influences?

💡 Past experience — consumers learn from what worked (and didn’t).

👭 Social norms — if no one repairs around us, consumers might not either.

🦾 Confidence — belief in your own or others’ ability to fix things.