Mining garage gold - exploring and expanding potentials for increased reuse in Swedish households

Research Project, 2022 – 2025

Increasing reuse by recirculating products between households is a key factor to achieve sustainable consumption patterns, optimise the use of produced objects and increasing resource efficiency. There are unused resources in the form of useful, but unused, products in people's homes and garages, and useful products are currently discarded or recycled. We assume/suspect an untapped potential for reuse, but how big is it really and how can it be utilized? This four-year project will explore the potential of the unused resources available in Swedish households and whether households can be enabled to release these to be reused by others. We do this through studies with households where we together inventory their resources and follow the process of recirculating products to new households. We also visit and interview actors involved with waste, recycling and reuse to understand what resources are reused today and how to judge the potential of unused products. With the knowledge of why resources are stored or reused, how households experience recirculation today, and ideas about what is missing to increase reuse, we invite stakeholders to co-create solutions that enable more recirculation - solutions in the form of products, infrastructure, services, business opportunities, information, processes or rules.