There's a reason that "recycle" comes last in the "reduce, reuse, recycle" catchphrase. There's a frightening amount of food, for example, that could simply not be wasted at all.
Similarly dated electronics doesn't get given away but gets disposed of because otherwise people could avoid buying new items.
Make things have long warranties and companies will introduce party's that wear, blame the customer, and then be sure those parts aren't available anymore.
To do this properly we need to transition away from capitalism; but the most powerful capitalists are the ones with the power to force the transition.
> Officials in the French Parliament voted unanimously to put an end to food waste by forcing large grocery stores to donate unsold food.
That is most of the food waste, but not the part that is mostly visible, which can't really be avoided, because few people have chickens to feed it to.
Besides that, the manufacturer has an intrinsic incentive to encourage people to throw away something only 1% broken to buy a 100% new replacement. Do you think Apple must glue the batteries inside the unopenable iPhone case, when other manufacturers have user-replaceable battery packs?
It is a rare person who will pay >100% to repair a broken device rather than pay 100% to replace it with a newer, possibly superior product in order to avoid the (more or less abstract in our minds, despite being very real) cost of all the externalities of that decision.
For example, Person A buys a new phone for $500 every 2 years. Person B buys a new phone for $525, and spends only $75 to replace the battery for a 3rd year. After 6 years, Person A spent $1500, and Person B spent $1200. Person B preferred to buy a phone that was more expensive up front, but cheaper to repair later.
But the other side of the equation is that the company selling to Person A makes more money by diminishing repairability. Person B is furious that Person A even exists, because the producers would always prefer to sell to the person willing to pay a higher price.
For instance, cutting up old milk jugs as scoops or as root-watering funnels would be a re-use, whereas washing out the plastic jug to hold water instead of milk would be a repair.
Scuttling an old naval ship as an artificial reef would be a re-use. Permanently mooring it and opening it for museum tours would be re-use. Stripping it of war materiel and refitting for use as a passenger ship would be re-use. Replacing the obsolete artillery guns with modernized radars and air/missile defense systems and replacing all worn or corroded parts would be a repair.
As such, I would put "repair" before "reduce". If you spend 120% on resources at construction time to also build repair parts, that item might last 50 years under repair instead of being reduced to 90% of normal resources and then reused after only 20 years. I have to assume that when something is reused, that it is simultaneously being replaced in its original purpose, which implies additional use of resources.