We appear on The One Show this evening, calling out in-built obsolescence and short product lifetimes and fixing with our community in Brixton. If you feel moved to get involved, we’re here for you! We have a growing network of like-minded groups across the UK.
The One Show Viewers, what you can do
Get involved with our work:
- Wherever you live, stay informed via our monthly newsletter
- Join our community by fixing or organising community repair events
- Ask your local repair group to sign The Manchester Declaration
- Look out for a European-wide Right to Repair campaign, coming soon
About us
The Restart Project helps people learn how to repair their broken electronics, through our Restart Parties: free community repair events where participants can work with a skilled volunteer to fix anything with a plug or a battery.
They’re spaces for learning skills and reflecting about how we consume in the first place. Repair is fun, it’s social, it saves money, and helps us be creative and constantly learn.
We’re based in London and we help other groups get started. And we’re part of a larger movement of community repair groups across the world, which keeps growing.
Last year, we held Fixfest UK, a UK-wide event in Manchester with 59 activists from 25 groups from Belfast to Pembrokeshire to Leeds. Together we drafted The Manchester Declaration, calling for more repairable products.
Why repair
Repair is simply common sense. People are tired of throw-away products: they remember when appliances lasted longer. One day we will look back at the past couple of decades and just shake our heads.
As we put to The One Show, electronics are very much our blind spot. It’s amazing to see people getting involved in plastic waste, food waste, fast fashion. But electronics have massive invisible environmental impacts too.
The UK is the world’s second highest producer of e-waste per capita, producing 55 pounds per year (source: United Nations University). The other top producing countries are much better at recycling than we are: between a quarter and a third of all e-waste ends up in landfill in the UK
What we can repair – and can’t
We also collect data about repairs across our network. The most popular products we fix at our events are laptops, mobiles, small kitchen appliances, hi-fi components and lamps. We repair a little over half of what is brought on the spot. A fifth is end-of-life.
With the rest, repair could be possible, but there are barriers. Often we refer unfinished repairs to professionals, however they share some of the same barriers we experience:
- lack of access to spare parts
- lack of repair documentation and tools
- product design often making disassembly impossible
All of these can be addressed by new European measures for ecodesign. New measures are groundbreaking, but they must go further, including communities and DIYers. And they must include new product categories, like laptops and mobiles. Defra has been supportive of these measures and we expect this support to continue.
There is massive public support to bring down barriers to repair, and for us to have the Right to Repair the stuff we buy. People overwhelmingly want more repairable products and they think the government should ensure this – more and more studies show this, both at European level and in the UK. A study published by the Green Alliance proves public support for repairable products.