Sustainability begins with learning to repair

A HINGE on our kitchen toaster broke recently. The heating elements still worked perfectly – it toasted bread as well as it always had. Only a small part holding the casing together had failed.

My first instinct was to repair it. Surely replacing a hinge could not be that difficult. I soon discovered otherwise.

Finding someone willing to repair a small household appliance was surprisingly hard. Spare parts were unavailable, and the labour would likely cost more than a new toaster. The advice from family and friends was unanimous: just buy another one.

It was entirely rational. Yet something felt wrong. The toaster was not beyond saving. What seems broken is the system around it – one that increasingly makes replacement cheaper, faster and more convenient than repair.

It made me wonder whether our sustainability conversation focuses too much on what happens after we discard something, and not enough on why we discard it in the first place.

Before recycling comes repair

Under the Singapore Green Plan 2030, Singapore wants to become a zero-waste nation powered by a circular economy, with reducing, reusing and recycling becoming the norm. One target is to cut waste sent to landfill per capita per day by 30 per cent by 2030.

Recycling is essential in this endeavour, but it occurs relatively late in the life of a product. Before recycling comes reuse. And before replacement, there is often another possibility: repair.

Every manufactured product involves the use of resources and energy – in the materials extracted, components manufactured, packaging produced and transportation from factory to store and home. Extending its useful life preserves some of that embedded value.

The circular economy therefore challenges an assumption deeply embedded in modern consumption – that when something breaks, its useful life is over. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t.

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When throwing away becomes rational

Consumers cannot shoulder this responsibility alone. If repairing a S$50 appliance costs S$80, replacement makes sense. If manufacturers stop producing spare parts, seal components inside products, or make repair information inaccessible, even willing consumers have few choices.

Sustainability must therefore address not only how consumers dispose of products, but also how businesses design and provide after-sales support. Durability should matter. So should repairability and access to spare parts.

A circular economy cannot be meaningfully sustained when consumers continually buy more products – even if society becomes increasingly efficient at recycling the old ones. The more fundamental achievement would be needing to replace fewer things in the first place.

Repair can pay

Encouragingly, Singapore already has examples of this thinking.

Repair Kopitiam, started in 2014 to counter throwaway culture, brings residents together with volunteer repair coaches to mend faulty electrical items, clothes, furniture and other household possessions.

Its significance goes beyond diverting objects from disposal. Practical knowledge is shared, neighbours meet, and people discover that apparently useless things can sometimes have a second life.

Repair need not be confined to households and community volunteers.

Sengkang General Hospital has applied a similar principle to damaged linen. Instead of automatically discarding it, the hospital repairs or repurposes what can still be used.

According to the government’s GreenGov.SG report, about 30 per cent of damaged linen could be reused, saving around 1.25 tonnes of waste and an estimated S$47,000 annually.

These examples challenge a persistent assumption that sustainability necessarily costs more. Sometimes waste is simply value we stopped seeing.

What we pass on

The benefits of repair may extend beyond economics and the environment.

A 2021 study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production identified four forms of care associated with collaborative repair: care for objects, other people, the community and the environment.

This matters in Singapore as practical skills once routinely found in neighbourhood repair shops have largely disappeared. Repair can become a form of intergenerational sustainability – preserving not only objects, but knowledge.

There is also a subtler lesson that can influence future generations. Children learn sustainability not only through what schools teach, but what adults do.

When a chair becomes wobbly, do we tighten its legs or buy a new chair? When a toy breaks, do we investigate what happened or immediately order another? When clothes tear, do we mend them?

No single decision will determine Singapore’s environmental future. But repeated across millions of everyday choices, they establish what a society considers normal.

A throwaway economy ultimately requires a throwaway culture. A circular economy requires different instincts.

Asking before binning

None of this means to romanticise the past or insist everything must be repaired.

Some appliances become unsafe. Technology changes. Repairs can legitimately cost much more than replacement. Convenience matters too.

The point is that replacement has become so effortless that we have stopped asking whether repair is possible.

I eventually replaced my toaster. Economically, it was the sensible choice. But that broken hinge left me thinking about what sustainability looks like when it moves from national targets into everyday life.

Singapore has become adept at thinking about sustainability at scale – greener buildings, cleaner transport, carbon emissions and sophisticated waste-management systems.

The next frontier may also be much smaller.

It lies in our kitchens, workplaces and neighbourhood shops; in how manufacturers design products and after-sales care; and in the everyday decisions through which we determine whether something has truly reached the end of its useful life.

I hope the next generation can grow up asking one more question before sending something to the bin, or clicking the “buy now” button: Can this be repaired?

Because the most sustainable product may not always be the newest, or the one made from recyclable materials. Sometimes, it is simply the one we already own.

The writer is chairman of SGListCos and a senior accredited director of the Singapore Institute of Directors. He was previously chief sustainability officer at Jardine Cycle & Carriage