Let's get fixable

“Am I your first toaster?”

Maureen has been having trouble. “The toaster won’t pop the toast,” she explains. “To be honest, the toaster didn’t cost much, but I’m reluctant to throw anything away.”

“You are my first toaster,” admits John, a volunteer repairer. “Most things are fairly straightforward. Not the air fryer though. I had to work out how to get inside before I could start to look at what was wrong. But I’m quite happy with toasters. I think.”

Maureen is visiting the Repair Café, a pop-up in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, run by community-led climate action group St Ives EcoAction. Repair Cafés like this match people who need stuff fixed with people who like fixing things. They offer free access to skills, saving people money, and reducing waste and emissions by extending the life of items.

But as John discovered with the air fryer, fixing stuff isn’t always easy. Many manufacturers have made it harder to repair items, keen that customers throw away and replace with new.

There’s a principle at stake here, says Professor John Naughton from Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy: “we are being denied a right to repair at a moment in time when the environmental impact of technology is having huge planetary consequences.”

The Right to Repair

Naughton and colleagues at the Minderoo Centre are asking how we can radically rethink the connection between digital technology, society and our planet.

“The accumulation of power by technology companies has both an environmental impact and a democratic one. People should be allowed to choose how they want to maintain and repair things rather than being forced to rely solely on manufacturers or authorised repair centres.”

“Digital technology has transformed our world; yes, absolutely it has. The challenge is how to reclaim it for civil society.”

The Right to Repair is a growing global movement. It campaigns for the right of people to repair their own electronic devices without being hindered by restrictive policies and practices of manufacturers.

A new law came into effect in the UK in 2021 to encourage manufactures to design their products to be more repairable, compelling them to keep spare parts available for a decade after production. But so far the legislation only covers washing machines, dishwashers and refrigerators, not smart devices.

It’s not just about electronics, though. The right to repair should cover almost everything we make, says Naughton. He describes being in a sports shop years ago and hearing the shop assistant saying to a customer “you want to re-sole your trainers? Nobody does that. You buy trainers, you wear them out and then you throw them away.”

He will be chairing a panel discussion at the Cambridge Festival on the Right to Repair on 28 March 2023. “I want to alert people to the possibilities of repair, that it’s more feasible than the industries pretend and that it’s really important to restore this control to the customer. I’d like people to see that it's possible to do things differently from the way we have been doing them.”

The rise of the fixers

Meanwhile, back at the Repair Café in St Ives, 14 expert repairers are cheerfully taking apart a base guitar, jewellery box, electric radiator, desk lamp, vacuum cleaner, bicycle wheel, computer, binoculars, clocks and all manner of items.

Helen Dye, Founder and Coordinator of St Ives Eco Action, explains that one of the main features of Repair Cafés, as was set in place by Repair Café International, the Netherlands-based ‘mother’ organisation, is that they are as much about skills sharing and learning, and the community working together, as they are about items being fixed.

“We find that people say afterwards ‘I now know what to look up on the internet if something like this happens again’, or, ‘I’ve gained the confidence and skills to fix this myself next time’.”

“These events are about putting people at the heart of change – helping them do something productive to be sustainable, and creating opportunities to share concerns about the environment. Even the tea and homemade cakes on offer are important for community building – it’s one of those ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ things, and everyone can play a role.”

She adds: “we have a great volunteer team and all sorts of repairers here. There’s a group over there repairing textiles and jewellery, some young engineers from a local company looking at electronic items, and here’s Clive, a retired surgeon who repairs clocks, ceramics, instruments and so on. We joke that he can even mend a broken heart, we’re just not insured for that!”

Making it easier for people to fix not fling

The Repair Café in St Ives is supported by the Cambridgeshire Repair Cafe Network (CRCN), a partnership between Cambridge Carbon Footprint, Transition Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire District Council. It started with just two Cafés in 2016 and now has a network of 26 active Café. The events are so popular that CRCN holds regular ‘How to run a Repair Café in your community’ training sessions and lends out tools to help grow the phenomenon.

Charlie Barty-King went along to a recent training session. After finishing his PhD a year ago in Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, he currently divides his work time between Cambridge Zero, where he coordinates a support programme for the Green Officers from the University’s 31 Colleges, and leads Wolfson College’s Interdisciplinary Research Hub on Sustainability & Conservation.

“We live in a single-use, disposable world and Repair Cafés obviously try to reverse this thinking,” he says. “Not only do they draw on local skills in the community but they also encourage people to be involved in the repair and even learn how to tackle it themselves.”

After meeting a bunch of like-minded individuals at the training event, he and a small team have been planning their first Repair Café in Trumpington.

“If Repair Cafés can engage people in wider discussions around sustainability and decarbonisation, either professionally or personally, then that’s a very valuable thing that’s worth supporting,” he says.

“I believe that the hardest part of most things is often starting. So if you can make things easier for others to start down a road they wouldn’t have otherwise – like having things fixed instead of thrown – then that’s a way to immediately have more impact for yourself and those around you.”