Reduce, reuse, repair and recycle

An example waste hierarchy : refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, and disposal.

The aim of this page is to recognise, celebrate and encourage the self-empowerment of community agency networks (CANs) and community groups' activism to Reduce, reuse, repair and recycle. Learn about how communities positively impact through different projects and collaborations.

The slogan Reduce, reuse, repair and recycle is an approach to the waste hierarchy that seeks to be as ecologically appropriate as possible and maximize the value and use out of a resource. It is sometimes shortened to "reduce, reuse, recycle" and sometimes, a fifth 'R' is added, such as 'refuse', 'remanufacture', 'recover', 'restore', 'redesign', 'repurposing', 'rot' (compost), etc.[1]

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  • News Homes built with clay, grass, plastic and glass: How a Caribbean island is shying away from concrete, bbc.co.uk/future (Jan 04, 2025)
  • News ‘Because secondhand is feckin’ grand’: how clothes swapping became huge in Ireland, theguardian.com (Oct 03, 2024)
  • News ‘It needs to stay in the loop’: German reuse schemes turn shopping upside down, theguardian.com (Jul 04, 2024)
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Read more

Events

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  • Event Oct 18, 2025 (Sat) — International Repair Day, annual celebration for everyone who makes repair happen in their communities around the world. "Repair for Everyone"., openrepair.org
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Networks

  • Plastic Pollution Coalition, global alliance of individuals, organizations and businesses working together to stop plastic pollution and its toxic impacts on humans, animals, the ocean and the environment.
  • Repair Café
  • WARPit, resource redistribution network

Community action projects

  • Bring and Fix schemes
  • Community art from recycled materials
  • Community paper collections
  • Develop community libraries of all kinds thereby promoting reuse and sharing, see separate article
  • Develop Community Recycling schemes or cooperatives, Community Wood Recycling Projects, Community compost schemes
  • Enable Computer recycling and Furniture recycling
  • Give or take days, Give or take stalls at Green fairs
  • Nappy laundering service
  • Plastic recycling, see Precious plastic
  • Precycling, Waste minimisation
  • promote free reuse and Better Use
  • Promoting products that are actually repairable in the first place (and not engineered to be disposable). A wiki or magazine could provide info on the most repairable products.
  • Rent instead of buy
  • Repair services and repair cafes
  • Scrapstores
  • Second-hand clothing, etc. stores, support charity shops
  • Waste exchange schemes
  • X-mas present swapping market

Bring and fix

Article in NewStart, October 2011

Bring & Fix, Rushey Green Time Bank, and on facebook

Precious plastic

Precious Plastic Version 4: A Big Bang for the Plastic Recycling crisis EINDHOVEN, The Netherlands - 7th January 2020

To date, only 9 percent of the plastic waste ever generated has been recycled, and only 14 per cent is collected for recycling now, according to the UN*.

For 6 years now, Precious Plastic is on a mission to boost these numbers with a bottom-up approach bringing recycling technologies and knowledge in the hands of everyone, all open source for free. Machines and techniques empower people around the world to start recycling plastic and create new financial value from a ubiquitous free resource, plastic waste. With more than a year of research and development, the fourth version of the project is released today, the Precious Plastic Universe.

It is an ecosystem of local recycling businesses built through business models, new and improved recycling machines, developments in product design techniques, guidelines to start collecting plastic, methods to create local recycling communities and online tools to share knowledge and to collaborate online and offline.

Now, everyone can get started on their plastic recycling journey. Everyone is a recycler.

Anyone, whether you are an engineer, machine builder, product designer, entrepreneur, volunteer or just a citizen worried about plastic pollution, you are now able to directly impact the global recycling problem. By focusing on businesses with this new iteration of the project, Precious Plastic can tip the scale in the right direction by fighting the plastic waste crisis on the bottom level. Because to have the greatest impact on local plastic waste, daily action needs to occur. There fore, for people wanting to do more, there needs to be facilities and tools for them to sustain themselves monetarily off of plastic recycling.

More businesses, more recycling. That simple.[2]

Repair Café

A Repair Cafe is a meeting in which people repair appliances/devices, organized by and for local residents. They meet at a fixed location where tools are available and where they can fix their broken stuff with the help of handy volunteers. Objectives are to reduce the waste pile, to maintain repairing knowledge and to strengthen the social cohesion.

Waste minimization

Waste minimization is a process of elimination that involves reducing the amount of waste produced in society and helps eliminate the generation of harmful and persistent wastes, supporting the efforts to promote a more sustainable society. Waste minimisation involves redesigning products and/or changing societal patterns, concerning consumption and production, of waste generation, to prevent the creation of waste.

Resources

Citizens data initiative

How to's

Maps

Quotes

"“The most important fact about our shopping malls is that we do not need most of what they sell.” Henry Fairlie[3]

"If the garbage man calls, tell him we don't want any" Groucho Marx

Research

Grassroots Innovation and the Circular Economy - A Global Survey of Repair Cafés and Hackerspaces PDF, July 2014

Other resources

  • iFixit, the free repair guide for everything, written by everyone. Global community of people helping each other repair things
  • Restart Party Kit
  • MyFixGuide, Teardown, Repair Guide For Laptop and Smartphone

See also: Circular economy, Environment quality, Ethical consumerism, Food activism, No such thing as waste, Zero waste towns, Sweden#Reduce, reuse, repair and recycle, Category:Recycling, Category:Composting

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External links

References

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