Sharing and Repairing at University: On Student Practices, and the Future of the Circular Campus

For decades, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have added their names to multi-scale environmental declarations and programmes for action, such as UNESCO’s ‘Education for Sustainable Development’. More recently HEIs have incorporated key facets of the Circular Economy into their norms and practices. While such agendas often focus on waste management regimes and infrastructural issues, this paper argues that on-campus borrowing and repairing practices are pivotal to any ‘circular campus’ goals, particularly the practices of students. Yet, little is known about the current borrowing and repairing attitudes and behaviours of HEI attendees. In response, this paper discusses the results of a project at Cardiff University (Wales), which surveyed students about what they currently borrow and repair; what they would like to borrow and repair; and what stands in the way of them doing more. The results show that, despite popular discourse that young adults—in particular Generation Z—are the ‘sustainability generation’, results suggest their attitudes and practices align quite closely to the broader population trends as drawn from the extant literature, in terms of barriers to action and low engagement with formal sharing and repairing platforms and spaces. As such, this paper argues that forms of circular practices need to be incorporated into on-campus ‘activist learning’ to increase skills and confidence amongst students: and to work towards displacing the norms of high consumption lifestyles that students are starting to display.