The article: Afterlife: An Essential Guide to to Design for Disassembly, written by industrial designer Alex Diener, talks about the many advantages of taking the "repairabillity" in to consideration when designing new products. I quote:
Design for easy repair + provide access to parts: If it can be worn out, it will need to be replaced, and the design should support that. Batteries, moving components, contact areas are all examples of parts that will need replacement at some point. The challenge is two-fold: make it easy to replace, and make the parts accessible for purchased through a website or reseller. If these two factors aren't considered, the life of the product is severely limited.
Not only is it, as Diener points out, important for material recycling needs that product are easily disassembled. I would argue that repairing things is the best way to recycle. For instance, if you do a life cycle analysis of carbon dioxide emissions for a product you will find that a large portion of the environmental "cost" is due to transports. The more advanced and processed a product is, the more energy has gone in to the assembly and manufacture of it. Any repair you make close to your home and with a minimum amount of new material to, say, double the life span of a product will cut all those environmental costs in half! The savings could be huge.
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