Fragments of a repaired ceramic piece, with gold lines tracing its cracks

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The broken object has not necessarily lost its value

Many objects are discarded under a quiet assumption: if something breaks, it stops being what it was. A crack becomes a sentence. The piece loses its appearance of wholeness and, with it, seems to lose the right to remain in our lives.

But use and integrity have never been exactly the same thing. A chair can hold the shape of the way someone sat in it. A cup can carry the coffee of many mornings. A device can remain useful when one small component stops working. A defect does not automatically erase an object’s history, function, or relationship with the person who kept it.

In her essay on ceramics restored with lacquer, Y. Shinoda describes repair with urushi and notes that, during the Momoyama and Edo periods, from 1573 to 1868, mending damaged ceramics was likely common practice. Extant examples suggest that gold-lacquer restoration might have become more common in the sixteenth century, although the lack of historical evidence prevents a definitive conclusion about when and how the method began.

That also calls for care with the word kintsugi. Shinoda notes that the term does not seem to appear in tea diaries and records of famous objects, the meibutsu. Repairs were recorded as tsugi, a join or patch, and tsukuroi, repair. The contemporary name is useful, but it should not turn a complex history into a postcard.

Hands working on a broken ceramic piece at a workbench

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When repair becomes an economic exception

The contemporary problem is not only that we have forgotten how to repair. Repair has often been placed outside everyday economics. Parts are unavailable, manuals are withheld, authorised service costs nearly as much as a new product, and disassembly has been designed as an obstacle.

In that setting, buying again can seem rational even when it is not the best material choice. The price of a new device appears in the shop window; the environmental cost of extraction, manufacturing, transport, and disposal remains distributed across the chain. The individual decision comes after a series of design decisions that the individual does not control.

The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 estimates that the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, an 82% increase from 2010. It projects 82 million tonnes by 2030 and records that only 22.3% of the 2022 volume was formally collected and recycled. Less than 1% of demand for rare earth elements was met through recycling.

Among the factors the report links to this widening gap are limited repair options and shorter product life cycles. Rising consumption, design failures that make disassembly difficult, and inadequate waste-management infrastructure also matter. Repair will not solve the e-waste problem alone, but the impossibility of repair makes useful life a decision that belongs less and less to us.

Electronic parts, hand tools, and a small object opened for maintenance

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Repair begins to enter regulation

The right to repair is not merely a preference held by unusually careful consumers. It involves information, access to parts, product design, manufacturer responsibility, and a fairer distribution of the costs of keeping things in circulation.

In the European Union, Directive (EU) 2024/1799 establishes common rules to promote the repair of goods and changes the relationship between warranty, service, and useful life. Its direction matters because it shifts the conversation: a product does not necessarily end when the sale ends, and buying another cannot be the only solution offered to a consumer.

In Brazil, Decree No. 10,240/2020 organises the implementation of reverse logistics for household electrical and electronic equipment. Data published by SINIR records 1,960 tonnes received in 2021 and 19,959.55 tonnes in 2022. Those figures help describe the collection chain, but they also show that recycling after disposal cannot replace designing things to last, open, maintain, and repair.

Regulation does not automatically make a workshop accessible. It can, however, change the conditions that make repair an exception: require information, make parts and tools more available, reduce asymmetries, and prevent obsolescence from being treated as inevitable. Law begins a conversation that must continue in design, commerce, and technical service.

Repair bench with hand tools, screws, and a restored component

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What Victor Lemos sees in this change

What interests me about repair is its refusal of a comfortable idea: that the new is always more desirable and the broken is always a delay. Repair gives things time back. It also gives people a question: what could continue if access, patience, a part, knowledge, and willingness were available?

This is not a romantic defence of keeping everything. Not every object deserves preservation, and not every repair is safe, cheap, or possible. Sometimes replacement is the wiser decision. The point is not to confuse that decision with a freedom that never existed. When there is no manual, part, service, or viable price, disposal is not a fully open choice.

Repair also changes the relationship between culture and infrastructure. Kintsugi may offer a beautiful image for thinking about the marks of time, but a politics of repair must go beyond metaphor. It involves screws, diagnoses, workshops, income, transport, standards, waste, and industrial design. The beauty of a seam cannot hide the politics that decide who gets access to it.

Perhaps repairing things has become so difficult because we learned to call a designed choice a destiny. Recovering that choice does not mean returning to a past without waste. It means building a present in which lasting, opening, caring for, and repairing things become concrete possibilities again — not acts of resistance available only to people who already know how.

Sources and references

Victor Lemos — Journalist, Author and Medical Student

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