We live in a society where buying new is often easier than repairing. Every year in the Netherlands, we throw away around 21 kilos of electronics per person, while up to half of those discarded devices are still repairable or immediately reusable. Yet only 8.7% of electronics actually get repaired.
Repairing saves raw materials, prevents waste, keeps products in use longer, and creates meaningful employment opportunities. But beyond the statistics, we believe repair signals something deeper: a fundamental shift in how we relate to the objects around us — from consumption and disposal toward stewardship and care. Every product thrown away is energy and material wasted, not just an object lost.
This conviction sits at the heart of In4Art’s own work on repair. Through our Value Repair research, developed in collaboration with academic partners, we explored what fair and just conditions for a repair economy would actually look like, proposing the 30-minute Repair Society as a vision for making repair as accessible and frictionless as buying new: a layered urban infrastructure where the right repair pathway is always close at hand, visible, and matched to what people are genuinely able and willing to do.
More recently, as academic coordinator of the LDE Thesis Lab “Future of Repair”, we guided master’s students to investigate exactly this question: “how do people care for, neglect, and relate to the things they own” which led to mapping the different healing journeys a broken product can take. Across both tracks, the same barrier kept surfacing: consumers want to repair, but too often run into high costs, unclear information, and a lack of accessible options. Policy has a decisive role to play in removing those barriers.
That is why In4Art has joined a broad coalition of more than 70 organisations and scientists behind the manifesto Accessible Repair of Electronics for Everyone, presented to policymakers in The Hague on June 30th, 2026 and discussed in parliament during the circular economy debates, supported by a new report by Natuur & Milieu mapping the barriers holding back the repair economy and proposing concrete policy solutions across three directions:
Consumers want to repair. Supportive policy conditions are needed to effectualise the right to repair: Read the full report from Natuur & Milieu here.
