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Large amounts of waste are produced when old furniture is routinely replaced with new as a result of relocations and reorganizations in both the private and the public sector. This article is an anthropological study of reuse interior design, an emerging field of interior design that seeks to enhance sustainability in homes and work spaces through using existing furniture and materials. Redesigners interact with materials not only to explore what they offer 'within' the design concept but also how they may 'affect' that concept. Recent theoretical debates within posthumanism and new materialism illuminate how human and non-human forces together co-produce socio-material outcomes. This perspective is here brought into productive conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ work on the science of the concrete, where he outlines a method for producing new knowledge about the world based on available resources. Building on this conversation, the article argues that the redesigners’ work–assisting existing materials and things in their continuous becoming and turning them into new designs–can be seen as a ‘design of the concrete’. This has wider implications for current debates about the transition into circular economy where recycling, rather than reuse and repair, plays an important role. However, recycling tends to reduce used things simply to their material constituents, depriving them of important social, cultural, and material values. The redesigners’ studio represents a space in which used things and materials are creatively repaired, redesigned or upcycled to be used for new purposes rather than being reduced in material recovery and recycling schemes.

Using the case of Sweden, this article examines the growing sector of reuse and second-hand activities from the perspective of how people express and practice their relationships to objects that they acquire from second-hand markets. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in flea markets, second-hand shops, homes and recycling depots, it explores how people relate to and handle goods which, instead of becoming waste, enter new life cycles through reuse. It suggests that buying, using and passing on certain kinds of second-hand things involves particular forms of affection and ‘serial’ care for the objects as things-in-motion. At the same time, part of the attraction of these objects is how they enable the practising of a particular kind of subjectivity: that of an informed, moral and caring consumer. Part of such reuse subjectivity is the capacity to form close bonds with, and care for objects, but also to untie these bonds in order to carefully and responsibly let go of them. The article suggests that paying attention to the affective orientation and disposition that form part of such consumer subjectivity may provide keys to understanding what drives second-hand consumption and the accelerated circulation of goods it may entail. Offering an opportunity to examine assumptions of reuse and circulation as inherently ‘sustainable’, it also provides perspectives on practices of care.

The concept of the circular economy has taken off, gaining momentum along with concerns about resource depletion, waste, and the impending ‘end of cheap nature’ (Moore 2014). Environmentalists and industrialists alike have promoted the benefits of reuse as a means toward improved efficiency and reduced resource pressure. Some have called for a new ‘culture of reuse’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Stokes et al. 2014). It is in this context that we explore repair, resale, and reuse as practices with deep historical precedent and contemporary continuity. Are there lessons to be learned from places that are already home to circular economies and strong cultures of reuse? And are there dangers inherent in a stronger, more formalized reuse sector? This paper draws on an historical and ethnographic analysis of vibrant reuse practices in the rural northeastern state of Maine. While there is a popular tendency to explain Maine’s persistent reuse practices as a response to economic and geographic marginality, our empirical observations suggest that these explanations do not adequately capture the complexity of reuse markets, discount the power of human agency and sense of place, and preclude important lessons for reuse policy in other contexts. Insights from Maine suggest that any effort to promote reuse would benefit from looking beyond purely economic rationales to attend to matters of place, sociality, and market relationality.

Among the mix of motivations that inspire people to sell and shop at garage sales is the desire to prevent the disposal of still usable goods. Sales can be so effective for redistributing consumer goods and reducing waste that numerous municipalities, such as Sunnyvale, California and Sydney, Australia, promote their sales through a community-wide staging. Lengthy corridor sales in the U.S., like that held annually on Route 127 (the “World’s Longest Yard Sale”), serve the same function, drawing positive media attention and promoting civic pride. But unlike the mundane act of recycling used papers and cans at the curb, making goods available for reuse at garage sales is an action loaded with personal sentiment. Second-hand purchases are often imbued with “sticky” emotional orientations (Ahmed 2010) and reminiscences. This article therefore examines the garage sale as a site for redistributing goods with emotions and histories attached. Participants derive some small recompense in the form of money made, the acquisition of inexpensive goods, and the self-satisfaction associated with reducing waste, but shoppers and sellers are also allied in a tug of war against the landfill to claim the future of goods, especially the storied items adopted by shoppers. Beneath their goal of cleaning out the garage, garnering some extra cash, or obtaining a bargain, participants assert that the reuse of and care for still serviceable goods is meritorious and morally praiseworthy. In the process of reuse, they enhance their moral selves and perform a good deed, however minor, by preserving both the stories of these objects and the embattled earth.

The interdisciplinary Electronic Life Histories Project integrates behavioral archaeology, engineering, anthropology, art, material culture, and science and technology studies to employ a life history model, community-based research and creative engagement to address the making of electronic waste. Focused in the Greater Lafayette area of Indiana, which is home to a major university, this project examines the entanglements among people, electronics and waste-making. Specifically, this paper focuses on a significant interstitial stage between reuse and discard. We consider the stories and meanings affixed to electronic objects once they have entered people’s homes, and the complex lives they have before they are discarded, reused, or repurposed. We find ‘closet fill’ or junk drawers of electronic devices, bits, bytes and peripherals are often unintentional collections that are situationally valued through a constellation of factors that include emotional attachments, technological obsolescence, imagined use-value, as well as discrepancies between perceived value and market value. While the problem of closet fill has been discussed by scholars, how electronics enter this interstitial stage, why they remain and what motivates movement out of this part of the life history of objects have not been closely examined. We suggest a life history approach can make these interstitial phases visible in a way that illuminates the key factors in keeping electronics versus discarding. As opposed to descriptions of waste as disorderly, abject, or disgusting, our work shows that objects at the interstices of wasting practices embody, represent, and express many meanings to participants socially, spatially, and structurally.

The reimagination and revaluation of discarded goods, through repair and reuse is, for many, a quotidian and mundane element of everyday life. These practices are the historical precedent and continue to be the stuff of common sense for a significant portion of human society. And yet, reuse, repair and other elements of a ‘circular economy’ have recently emerged as a significant focus in environmental and economic policy. Proponents claim that reuse practices represent a potentially radical alternative to mainstream consumer culture and a form of carework that generates new social possibilities and personal affects. This essay explores the myriad dimensions of reuse as care, relational practice and as consumer alternative by examining these practices in their social context, lived experience and as embedded within larger political and economic structures of capitalist accumulation and abandonment. We argue that the study of reuse, in old and new forms, takes on added political significance in an era of environmental and economic crises, especially as a critical part of state-based approaches toward the circular economy that attempt to appropriate carework in new forms of value generation.