Saturday, March 17, 2018

Can we fix it? The repair cafes waging war on throwaway culture


A vacuum cleaner, a hair straightener, a laptop, Christmas lights, an e-reader, a blender, a kettle, two bags, a pair of jeans, a remote-control helicopter, a spoon, a dining-room chair, a lamp and hair clippers. All broken.
It sounds like a pile of things that you’d stick in boxes and take to the tip. In fact, it’s a list of things mended in a single afternoon by British volunteers determined to get people to stop throwing stuff away.
This is the Reading Repair Cafe, part of a burgeoning international network aimed at confronting a world of stuff, of white goods littering dumps in west Africa and trash swilling through the oceans in huge gyres.
The hair clippers belong to William, who does not want to give his surname but cheerfully describes himself as “mechanically incompetent”. He has owned them for 25 years, but 10 years ago they stopped working and they have been sitting unused in his cupboard ever since.

By Kate Lyons