Education for sustainable consumption through repair and upcycling - extending the useful life of products as part of the transformation to a sustainable society

The revitalisation of the repair culture is an essential element of extending the useful life of products. As a contribution to education for sustainable development, in addition to teaching specific repair skills, it is about returning to the value of repair as an alternative to unsustainable consumption and an economic concept that suggests that growth is desirable and sensible per se. Alternative educational concepts that focus on experiential learning and self-efficacy can be applied both in and out of school.

The RETIBNE project, which is funded by the DBU, contains many repair instructions and explanations of the need to extend the useful life of everyday products.

The Techno-Lingua project offers repair and upcycling programmes for children and young people who are not yet proficient in German and want to learn the German language through action.

The ReparierBar is a project run by students at the University of Oldenburg. It offers a Repair Café for young people in the workshops of the Technical Education working group. There is also a children's repair café.

The DBU-funded TransREPAIRent project combines behavioural experiments in Economics Education with repair and upcycling offers from the Technical Education working group.

Forever Day One offers the "Hornbach macht Schule" project. This concept is presented here, along with the experiences that students of the subject of technology have had with implementing the concept in schools.