Open Access

Kristina SteinbißORCiD

• Repair is crucial to the circularity of material flows since it increases the longevity of products. In an economy designed to be regenerative, repair is better understood as a sociometric practice that reconfigures the interaction between people and things. As repair is one main focus of the transition to a regenerative circular system, it helps limit the damage previously done to the environment. What has already been produced, such as materials or products, is prolonged and sustained because of its capacity to repair, reorganise and purify the environment (van der Velden et al., 2023). The principle of repair aims to make a defective product usable again in its original function. This is vital, especially with declining product durability and lifetime before reaching obsolescence. Simply put, obsolescence is the state of no longer being useful or in use. In this context, it is important to elucidate what the “optimal lifetime” of a product is. A closer look at the Eionet (2020, pp. 10–14) report reveals three different types of product lifetime: the useful/actual lifetime, the designed lifetime and the optimal lifetime.