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"Our sustainability strategy is focused on repair."
I hear this regularly from brand sustainability teams — and I understand the appeal. Repair is tangible, visual, and easy to communicate. A customer watching their favourite jacket get a new lease of life is a powerful brand moment. It generates revenue through service fees. It photographs well. And the legislative signals in Europe are pointing firmly in its direction: the EU's Right to Repair Directive, France's Repair Bonus for clothing, upcoming ESPR repairability requirements for textiles.
Repair is important. I'm not here to argue otherwise. But there's a pattern I keep seeing that concerns me.
Retailers and brands are investing in repair programmes — the storytelling, the in-store experience, the marketing — while product take-back runs quietly in the background as an operational obligation. Not absent, but not energised. Not strategic. Not given anywhere near the same attention.
And that imbalance is a problem. Because repair only addresses half the product lifecycle. And the half it misses is the one generating 92 million tonnes of textile waste a year.
92 million tonnes of textile waste a year — and repair addresses none of it at end-of-life.
Repair has a shelf life. Every product does.
Repair extends the life of products that still have a useful life ahead of them. That's valuable. But it does nothing for the millions of tonnes of products that have already reached end-of-life — worn out, damaged beyond repair, or simply no longer fit for purpose.
Every repaired product will, eventually, reach that same end point. The jacket you restitched will eventually wear through again. The shoes you resoled will eventually hit a condition where repair stops making sense. What happens then?
Right now, for most consumers, what happens is the bin. One in two people throw their unwanted clothes straight in the general waste rather than donating or recycling. The average garment is worn fewer than ten times before being discarded. And when you account for textiles mixed into general household waste, the share going to landfill or incineration in the EU rises to 73%.
Repair doesn't address this. Take-back does.
Why repair gets all the energy
It's worth being honest about why the imbalance exists, because the reasons are understandable.
Repair generates revenue. A retailer can charge a service fee for stitching, resoling, or replacing a zip. There's a clear margin attached. Take-back, by contrast, has historically looked like a cost line — collecting products, storing them, moving them to a recycler, with no obvious commercial return.
Repair tells a better brand story. It feels premium. Recycling feels like waste management. In a market where sustainability messaging is a competitive differentiator, the optics matter.
The commercial model for take-back has been opaque. Without data on what comes back, from which customers, and what it's worth in terms of retention and acquisition, the business case has been hard to build internally. We've written before about how take-back actually outperforms paid social as a customer acquisition channel — but that thinking hasn't reached most sustainability or marketing teams yet.
And there's a genuine trust gap when it comes to recycling. Retailers have watched the broader waste industry struggle with contamination, downcycling, and exported textiles ending up in landfill overseas. If the available recycling options don't feel credible, it's rational to invest in something you can control — like your own repair workshop.
The legislative landscape has reinforced this. The Right to Repair Directive requires manufacturers to provide affordable repair services. France subsidises consumers who get garments fixed. The ESPR is preparing repairability requirements for textiles. If you're a brand sustainability lead reading the regulatory roadmap, repair looks like the safe bet.
But that's reading only half the map.
When repair is done right, it's extraordinary
I want to pause here, because I don't want this to read as an argument against repair. It isn't.
I sat down recently with the team at a trail running brand, and heard them talk about cobblers. Not "repair services." Not "aftercare programmes." Cobblers. The people, the craft, the skill of taking a worn shoe and making it whole again.
It stopped me in my tracks. Cobbling is a profession that was once commonplace in every town — a skill set that was part of how we lived with the things we owned. We lost it. It disappeared so gradually that most of us didn't notice. And now, brands are actively supporting its return, connecting customers with cobblers and building repair into the relationship between the brand and the person who wears their shoes.
Cobbling is a profession that was once commonplace in every town. We lost it so gradually that most of us didn't notice. Now, brands are actively supporting its return.
That is authentic. It's not a sustainability slide deck. It's a brand saying: we made this product, we believe in it, and we want to help you keep it going as long as possible.
What was most encouraging to me was that the brand doesn't treat repair as the whole answer. They get that a shoe eventually reaches a point where even a skilled cobbler can't bring it back. They invest in recycling too, because they understand that the product lifecycle has more than one chapter. Repair is one of them. End-of-life is another. And both need to be taken seriously.
That's the mindset I wish more brands would adopt. Not repair or take-back. Not repair as the headline act and take-back as the afterthought. Both, with genuine energy behind each.
The same regulators want both
The same EU that is championing repair has also mandated separate textile collection across all Member States from January 2025. The revised Waste Framework Directive, which entered into force in October 2025, requires mandatory EPR schemes for textiles by mid-2027 — making producers financially responsible for the collection, sorting, and recycling of the products they place on the market.
The regulatory intent is clearly both: design for longevity and repair at the front end, and ensure proper collection and recycling at the back end. A brand that invests heavily in repair but runs a passive take-back programme is building half a circular strategy — and the half it's missing is the one that's about to carry financial obligations under EPR.
As we explored in The Economics of Waste, the compliance burden for end-of-life products is real and it's shared between brands and retailers. Repair doesn't discharge that obligation. Collection does.
The gateway behaviour no one is talking about
Here's where it gets interesting — and where I think the repair-first crowd is missing something fundamental.
Repair and take-back have very different economics and cost structures. But they share one thing: consumer decision-making sits at the heart of both. The difference is the size of the ask.
Take-back requires a simple action — bring the product back, get a reward, done. Repair asks the consumer to evaluate the product, decide whether it's worth fixing, pay for the service, and wait. One is a low-friction habit. The other is a considered decision.
This is why take-back may actually be the gateway behaviour that makes repair culture viable at scale.
When you normalise the idea that a product doesn't belong in the bin — that bringing it back to a store is just what you do — you're shifting the default away from disposal. Once that mindset is established, the step from "I should return this" to "maybe I should get this repaired first" becomes much shorter. The consumer who's already in the habit of thinking about end-of-life is far more likely to think about extending life.
You can't build a culture of repair without first breaking the culture of throwing things away. Take-back is how you break it.
The data flows both ways
There's a practical dimension to this as well. When you're running a well-instrumented take-back programme — capturing structured data on the brands, product types, conditions, and ages of items being returned — you're building an intelligence layer that tells you exactly where repair investment will have the highest impact.
Which product categories are coming back prematurely? Which brands are showing durability issues? Where would a repair intervention actually extend meaningful product life, versus just delaying the inevitable by a few months?
Repair without take-back data is a strategy based on assumption. Take-back without repair misses the opportunity to extend product life. Together, they cover the full lifecycle — and each makes the other smarter.
The question for brand sustainability teams
I'm not suggesting repair isn't important. It is. But the energy imbalance between repair and take-back in most brand and retail strategies doesn't reflect the scale of the problem, the direction of regulation, or the commercial opportunity.
Take-back isn't the unglamorous cousin of repair. It's the foundation that makes repair — and the entire circular strategy — work.
The retailers and recycling partners who are already proving this, from Rotterdam to Melbourne, aren't waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up. The question is whether the brands setting the sustainability agenda will recognise that the product lifecycle doesn't end at repair — and start energising the programmes that capture what happens next.
