Consumers and self-repair: What do they repair, what skills do they have and what are they willing to learn?

Abstract

Supporting repair is among the key strategies for achieving circular economy by 2050. Although consumers are generally positive towards repair, they often lack self-repair skills. This calls for a better understanding of consumers' current self-repair activities, repair skills, and willingness to develop them further. Our nationally representative survey (N = 1,000) from Finland showed that consumers felt most confident about repairing textiles and bicycles. Although they did not consider themselves to be skilled in repair, they showed a willingness to develop their skills further. The willingness to develop repair skills was positively associated with the level of education, self-evaluated repair skills, previous repair experience, frugality, and minimalism, as well as egoistic and biospheric environmental concerns, and negatively with older age. These findings underscore the importance of developing product design, policy measures and educational initiatives that reinforce (rather than undermine) the good will of citizens to update their repair skills.