Thinking with material care

Engaging with care theories and perspectives arising from repair studies, this article proposes material care as a conceptual possibility to think with and to interpret material relations leading to overconsumption and wasting. We bring theoretical ideas on material care into conversation with empirical material from Finland, a country in which discarding is made easy with functioning waste management infrastructures. We use the material to gain understanding of what material care means in practice for people in their everyday life. With selected insights from the material gathered through object-centred dialogues, we reflect on care ethics in action, showing how material objects themselves influence people's choices on care and how avoiding care is part of the ethical considerations. We also discuss affective and embodied relations with things and meaning-making and creativity as crucial elements of material care. Our finding is that people do care about their things even though consumerism suggests otherwise, and we propose that this is because material care is significant to people's wellbeing in ways that are rarely addressed in present policy frameworks. The value of thinking with material care lies in the alternative visions for sustainability that it allows to nurture.