Retuna
ReTuna Återbruksgalleria sits beside the municipal recycling centre in Eskilstuna, so dropping off old things and shopping for used ones happen on the same visit.
ReTuna Återbruksgalleria in Eskilstuna, Sweden, is a shopping centre where nearly everything on sale has had a previous owner. It opened on 28 August 2015, it is owned by the city's municipal energy and environment company, and it is usually described as the world's first recycling mall. Residents leave unwanted goods at a depot next door, workers sort and repair them, and a group of shops sells them on.
If you came here wondering whether the place is real, whether it still runs and how it actually works, the short answers are yes, yes, and through a simple chain of donation, sorting, repair and resale. The more interesting part is why a Swedish town built a mall around used goods at all, and what that tells the rest of us about waste.
What ReTuna is and where it sits
Eskilstuna is an industrial town, the centre of a municipality of just over 100,000 people, roughly 100 kilometres west of Stockholm. ReTuna stands at Folkestaleden 7, on the edge of town, directly beside the main recycling centre. The name joins "re", as in reuse, with "Tuna", the local nickname for Eskilstuna. "Återbruksgalleria" simply means reuse gallery or reuse mall.
The building was not a private retail venture. Construction began in August 2014 under Eskilstuna Energi och Miljö (EEM), the company the municipality owns to run energy, water and waste services. The mall was part of the city's climate and waste-reduction plans, which is why it was placed where people were already bringing their rubbish.
Encyclopaedic summaries describe about 3,000 square metres of retail space split into 14 shops. Over the years these have included furniture, electronics and computers, clothing, toys, sports equipment, bicycles, garden supplies and building materials, along with a café.
How a donated item reaches the shelf
The clever part of ReTuna is the flow of goods. A visitor arriving by car first sorts their waste into the recycling centre's containers: metal here, cardboard there, garden waste in another skip. Anything that still works, or could be made to work, goes instead to a staffed drop-off point called Returen.
At Returen, staff from AMA, the municipality's unit for activity, motivation and work, make a first check of what is usable. That detail matters: the intake doubles as a work-training programme for people returning to employment. Usable items are then passed to the shops, where each tenant makes a second selection and decides what to repair, what to convert into something new, and what can go straight onto the floor.
So a dining chair might be reglued and reupholstered, a lamp rewired, a pile of worn jeans cut into bags, and a box of children's books simply priced and shelved. The shops get a steady, free supply of stock; the city diverts goods away from incineration and landfill; and shoppers find things that are cheaper than new and often better made than modern equivalents.
Retuna
Inside the mall, each shop specialises in a category of second-hand goods, from furniture and clothing to electronics and garden items, after staff have checked and repaired what was donated.
More than shopping: café, courses and visits
ReTuna was designed to be somewhere people stay for a while. There is a café and restaurant with an organic menu, plus rooms for conferences, events and exhibitions. Groups from Sweden and abroad book guided tours and study visits to see how the model works.
Education is built in. Eskilstuna Folkhögskola, a Swedish folk high school, runs a one-year course called Recycle Design – Återbruk on the premises, teaching students to design and make products from reclaimed materials. The building also hosts lectures and workshops on repair and sustainable living, so the mall acts partly as a public classroom.
The centre's manager at launch, Anna Bergström, summed up the hoped-for visit on the ReTuna website: "When you leave here, you should feel that you did something good for the environment." That is a fair description of the intended experience: donate, browse, eat, browse again, and go home with something that already existed.
Why reuse ranks above recycling
People often call ReTuna a "recycling mall", but strictly speaking most of what happens there is reuse. The difference is not just wording. European waste policy follows a five-step order of preference set out in the EU Waste Framework Directive of 2008: first prevent waste, then reuse, then recycle, then recover energy, and only last dispose of what remains.
Reuse sits near the top because it keeps a product intact. A wardrobe that gets a new owner remains a wardrobe; all the energy, material and labour that went into making it continues to be useful. Recycling, by contrast, breaks the item down into raw material, which takes energy and usually loses quality. Energy recovery burns it, and landfill buries it.
Sweden is often praised for sending very little household waste to landfill, but much of that waste is burned for district heating. That is better than a dump, yet it still destroys the object. ReTuna is an attempt to catch goods one step earlier, before they become fuel or scrap.
Jobs, sales and the limits of the model
By ReTuna's own account, the mall has created more than 50 jobs in repair, upcycling and retail. In 2018 it reported sales of recycled products worth SEK 11.7 million, roughly one million euros at the time. Encyclopaedic summaries put the average at around 700 visitors a day.
Those are healthy figures for a local centre, but they need context. ReTuna is municipally owned, and a 2026 trade article marking its tenth anniversary noted that its continued operation depends on public support. That is not a flaw so much as a design choice: the city treats the mall as part of its waste infrastructure, in the same way it funds the recycling centre next door, rather than as a standalone business that must compete with new-goods retailers on price alone.
It is also worth being realistic about scale. One mall cannot absorb all the furniture and clothing a city throws away, and not every donation is worth repairing. Some goods are broken beyond economic repair, out of fashion, or unsafe. The value of ReTuna lies in making reuse the easy, visible default for the share of goods that can have a second life.
Ideas other towns and shoppers can borrow
The lesson cities have taken from Eskilstuna is about location and flow. Put the reuse shops where people already bring their waste, add a staffed intake that sorts and checks goods, and give tenants a reliable stream of free stock. Similar reuse centres and "repair hubs" now operate in several European countries, and the idea of linking resale to municipal waste systems keeps spreading.
For individual shoppers, the same thinking works at a smaller scale:
- Check before you buy. Look for missing parts, test electrical items in store if possible, and ask what repairs were done.
- Favour things that can be fixed. Solid wood, screws instead of glue, and standard parts make it easier to keep an item going.
- Donate while it still works. A working toaster or a clean coat is far more likely to be reused than one left in a shed for years.
- Repair first. Local repair cafés and tailors can often extend an item's life for less than the cost of a replacement.
ReTuna's real achievement is not a single clever shop but a joined-up system in which donations, skilled hands and customers meet in one place. It shows that "used" can be a normal, attractive way to shop when a town makes it convenient.
Sources: ReTuna: About us; ReTuna official site; Wikipedia: ReTuna; Wikipedia: Waste hierarchy; Inside Retail: The world's first second-hand mall is still leading the circular revolution; originally reported by Good News Network and True Activist.
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