Today, as countless products can be bought brand-new with just a touch of a finger, repair-related skills have largely fallen to the wayside, and the perpetual manufacturing of new items has made tracking down replacement parts a challenge.
In these conditions, buying a replacement seems like the easy way out, especially when it comes to outdoor gear—a convenience that negatively impacts the environment that same gear helps us enjoy.
KORE Outdoors, a grassroots, non-profit organization in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, has always supported the outdoor gear sector’s ecosystem. Seeing a deep need for a better way of doing things, they launched the Re-Hub program to offer a circular solution to everyone in the region.
We spoke with Kevin Pennock, Co-Founder and Executive Director at KORE Outdoors, about how this program is equipping people with the repairs and skills they need to save costs and protect our planet.
What inspired you to start your circular economy initiative, the KORE Re-Hub?
A lot of this came out of personal need. All of us reside in the Kootenay region, where we live and breathe the outdoors. We all use outdoor gear. I don’t know if there’s exact data on this, but my guess would be that per capita in the Kootenays, we are probably the highest users of outdoor gear in Canada. Yet there are very few people in the Kootenays who fix outdoor gear as a full-time gig.
Another component is that KORE Outdoors is a local outdoor gear collective—we have 80+ different gear makers and designers in the Kootenays. We just can’t bear to think of it as a take-make-waste linear flow of consumption. We wanted to advocate for a circular model, to consider what you do with the gear at the end of its life. We can’t just wash our hands of that and not think about how to help solve the problem.
So we had the idea to do a mobile gear repair tour, travelling throughout the Kootenays, fixing outdoor gear for free, and educating communities about the importance of circularity. We were fortunate to get a grant from the CleanBC Plastics Action Fund to make it happen.
In the summer of 2025, we toured 12 different towns all throughout the region, stopping at farmers’ markets, sporting events, and festivals. We fixed everything from jackets to backpacks to tents—more than 500 pieces of gear in total.
Why is building a culture of repair important for advancing the circular economy, and how is your initiative helping to integrate circularity in the outdoor gear industry?
Repair is one of the pillars of circularity, and the best available option—given current technology—for keeping outdoor apparel out of the landfill. Upcycling and recycling are complex and difficult. Less than 1% of materials in outdoor clothing and gear are recycled; 85% end up in landfills. That’s because the fabrics are usually a blend of highly technical materials. You’re not just taking cotton and re-spinning it into another cotton fabric. You’re working with blended fabrics that are really difficult to deconstruct and spin back into a raw material.
Repair, on the other hand, isn’t difficult. Most of the fixes we did were straightforward, like swapping a worn zipper slider on a jacket so it zips properly again. People don’t want to throw away technical apparel; they just don’t have access to even basic repairs. The KORE Re-Hub Tour brought repair into the community and proved there’s strong demand. We repaired outdoor apparel for free, but our survey showed participants were willing to pay, on average, 29% of an item’s value for repair. That suggests it could be a viable business.
What do you consider to be your biggest success in advancing the circular economy both locally and in your industry? Can you share any stories of impact your work has had that have surprised you?
The vast majority of a garment’s footprint—whether we’re talking emissions, water, or energy—happens at the beginning, when the item is made. If you can keep a piece of outdoor apparel in use for a year longer, five years longer, ten years longer, you’re mitigating having to create that huge upfront footprint to make another one.
The KORE Re-Hub Tour extended the lifespan of 509 items by an average of 9 months—that’s 382 years of extended gear life. We had a consultant run the numbers, and she determined that 14.5 tons of CO2e emissions were avoided by repairing those items instead of buying new ones. Approximately 1.13 million litres of water and 6,286 kWh of energy were saved.
What surprised us was the sheer volume of requests we’re now getting from other organizations. Can the Re-Hub repair trailer come to the FAST Ski Swap in Fernie? Can it come to Nelson for an Earth Day event in April? Can it come to the BC Outdoor Recreation Council Conference in May in Kamloops? And it’s not just in the Kootenays. People from North Vancouver have contacted us to do a sustainability initiative with them this summer. The Surfrider Foundation Canada in Ucluelet—which is doing amazing work with surf gear and apparel—wants us to come out for a joint project. So really, it’s opened up a floodgate of invitations to promote circularity in places all across BC and Western Canada.
What are some of the challenges you typically face working to advance the circular economy in the outdoor recreation industry?
In the soft goods side, the biggest challenge is the textile blends and the recyclability of these high-tech fabrics. But overall, in the outdoor gear world for circularity, the hard goods category is really the most challenging.
As part of our Re-Hub Tour last summer, we worked with Selkirk College’s Selkirk Technology Access Centre on a hard goods pilot project. Gear users from the Kootenays brought ski boots, trekking poles, and ski bindings to our repair trailer to see whether it was feasible to actually fix these specific pieces of gear.
The answer was most often yes, it’s repairable. But to actually follow through with the repair was a different story. Say you need to fix a hard goods widget. Even though it’s only five years old, the brand no longer carries the part. So you have to go on a treasure hunt to find it. In the end, between the time and the labour, it often isn’t feasible or affordable.
Some hard goods, like bicycle frames and parts, are very recyclable because they’re scrap metal (steel, aluminum, titanium, carbon), but there’s no system in place to do it. So the question becomes, how can we put together a system with the transfer stations, with the municipalities, with the regional districts, working with industry partners like bicycle shops, to have scrap bins, to have a diversion path to process end-of-life bicycle frames?
Same thing with bicycle tubes and tires. For car tires, you can take them to your local dealership and pay a disposal fee when you buy the new tires. There’s a diversion path for your car tires, but there’s nothing for bicycle tubes and tires. There’s nothing set up for diversion and upcycling for plastic helmets either.
We’re trying to explore ways to solve some of these problems, like can we work with the plastic recyclers and do a pilot project to actually disassemble a ski helmet, bike helmet, or a climbing helmet, take out the liner, and divert the shell to a plastic processor in the Lower Mainland? These are some of the immediate challenges but also the opportunities that we see.
Are there any upcoming events, projects, trends, or advancements related to your work with the KORE Re-Hub Program you’d like to share?
We are planning to do the Re-Hub Tour again for 2026—we’re working to source the funding for it right now—and hoping to be able to say yes to some of the invitations we’ve received to take the mobile repair trailer beyond the Kootenay region.
A new project that we’re very excited about is creating a Re-Hub Circularity Centre at the College of the Rockies, a permanent repair facility to complement the mobile tour. It will be an outdoor gear repair school; there’s currently nowhere in BC where you can go to learn these skills outside of learning on the job at a major brand or teaching yourself. We’ll do gear repair there, and also repurposing, taking dead stock and end-of-life gear and turning it into something new. There will also be a shared community space—kind of like a commercial kitchen—that makers and designers can book for small-batch apparel manufacturing projects and prototyping.
Looking ahead, what are your hopes for the circular economy in the Kootenay region over the next decade, and how do you envision contributing to this vision? How can other individuals/organizations help?
We envision the Kootenays becoming a hub for circularity and repair in the outdoor sector, including training and workforce development. The Re-Hub Tour was an important step in that direction. We hope that the new KORE Re-Hub Circularity Centre at the College of the Rockies will officially put the region on the map and serve as a model going forward. Beyond that, we aspire for the Kootenays to become the epicentre for the outdoor rec-tech industry.
And we’re looking to collaborate with other foundations and NGOs. There’s a circular economy group in Calgary, for example, that is doing great work. There are also brands like Arc’teryx and Patagonia with a strong sustainability focus. We want to learn from them, and we hope they’ll want to collaborate with us. We will all go further and bigger if we work together.
This story was featured in Circular Economy Magazine:
