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The Countless Lives of Newspapers and the Right to Repurpose

Abstract For the past decade, the environmental agenda has been unavoidable for social actors such as governments, NGOs, companies, and individuals. The climate crisis has also reached the field of design, demanding production and disposal processes that do not take a toll on the planet. This article focuses on the overlooked strategy of repurposing, through which everyday consumers transform and subvert simple objects, providing them with novel functions and a new lifespan. To understand how certain elements of design may affect consumers’ willingness to reinvent things, we take newspapers as a case study, giving their plasticity and their many diverse and unexpected functions. Throughout the analysis, a range of physical and social features are singled out, offering novel paths to sustainable design and reflecting on how the industry may prepare objects in advance to be reconfigured at the hands of their users.