Repair Cafes And The Consumer Apocalypse
As poverty cuts deeper into society, more and more people can’t afford to do something that used to be considered ‘normal’: if something’s broken, chuck it and get a new one. With cheap imported sweatshop goods around why repair anything? And because this had been the way for years, skills that used to be passed down generations, like sewing, were lost. And anyway, most things these days are so hi-tech they require a rocket science degree to fix… or do they?
Pushing back against throwaway culture, the UK now has around 140 Repair Cafes alongside other community-level mending or fixing events. ‘Repair Cafe’ is a world-wide network, started in the Netherlands in 2007, and are typically held monthly, volunteer-run and on a free/donation basis. Other mending workshops are open more frequently, some even daily.
Associated with these are the community workshops, tool libraries and ‘library of things’ which have appeared in recent years, no doubt in response to post-2010 austerity and the cost of living crisis, emerging at the same time as other localised volunteer-run efforts such as the kitchens serving meals from surplus or locally grown food, and/or redistributing free food.
So what gets fixed? Electrical or electronic stuff, furniture, clothing and other fabrics, shoes, bikes, small mechanical items – or whatever random things people bring in.
This helps save money but these events are also about skill sharing and changing that disposal consumerist mindset. Because unless you’re living off-grid, off-line, and foraging from a cave, you are in a society which makes it very hard to not be dependent on consumer goods such as phones, clothes, furniture etc, often made by cheap labour in the Global South.
Of course repairers are fighting an uphill battle against built-in obsolescence and even deliberate strategies to make repairs tricky and force you to go to an authorised dealer. Plastic mouldings which are hard to disassemble without breaking (looking at you Dyson), or ‘serialisation’ where a unit won’t accept a replacement part because it’s got different serial numbers (a lot of modern cars and a shout out to Apple).
Recent EU ‘Right To Repair’ legislation is a positive – but fairly toothless – first step to redress this by introducing a set of conditional regulations stating that an item should be repairable using normal tools, and that spare parts and technical data be made available for a period of time to (some) independent repairers. But unfortunately these laws mostly only cover white-goods and TVs. Britain introduced its own version of RTR, while France is the country leading the way with this, and is currently taking Apple to court over RTR breaches.
Central to the idea of Repair Cafes is that this is not a drop-off-pick-up-later repair service: yes there are volunteers with specific skills at hand, but people who bring in items are encouraged to either attempt the repair themselves – with friendly help – or at least watch, learn and open up to the possibility of trying to mend things. They find out that even with basic tools, materials and a bit of common sense, they can gain confidence and save money, while building the social and mutual aid networks that might help us through the next decades.
- See also repaircafe.org/en
- Library Of Things – UK directory – www.ethicalconsumer.org/home-garden/library-things-directory
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