The role of creative reuse centres in responsible artistic production and consumption in the US

This chapter explores the implications of creative reuse centres in the United States as social innovators towards responsible artistic production and sustainable consumption of creative works. The abundance and management of waste is a wicked problem across the globe. This chapter illustrates an emerging solution to waste management through the phenomenon of creative reuse centres across the US. The US has seen the emergence of creative reuse centres in almost all 50 states. There is also a significant lack of research on the social impact of creative reuse centres in the broader creative economy. Previous studies have centred on the term “creative reuse” as related to the development of disused buildings and unused spaces (Narver, 1983; Cerreta, Elefante and La Rocca, 2020; Giglio, Sansotta, and Grillo, 2022). A significantly small amount of studies address the creative reuse of discarded materials in the artmaking of children in school (Girak, Lummis, and Johnson, 2019). Expanding beyond the term “creative reuse” is the use of similar terms like “upcycling” or “repurposing”, and there is a small number of studies that have explored the individual artistic practice of foraging and/or acquiring discarded items and (re)making them within various creative and cultural industries such as the craft industry (Sung and Cooper, 2015), visual art industry (Mallabadi, 2020), and design industries (Bridgens et al., 2018; Chiais, 2022). While these studies help to establish an understanding of “creative reuse” in the design industry, in educational settings, and as part of an artist’s social practice, there is a growing phenomenon of creative reuse centres that operate as hybrid organisations – creative social enterprises, a type of hybrid enterprise that merges creative, social, and enterprise values and practices (Wells, 2022; 2019) – providing both environmental services to their communities and social goods to creative consumers like artists, art students, and creative practitioners. Ultimately, this chapter serves as an example of how creative reuse centres disrupt the current environmental problem of waste management and how they contribute to addressing the issue through social innovation and creative social enterprise structuring as art material retail spaces.