Restarters in London definitely earned a quiet Christmas holiday after a mammoth effort to Restart The Capital. As well as taking fixing activity to Parliament and the Greater London Assembly we ran events in libraries, community centres and church halls across 14 London boroughs, on all points of the compass.
Over 350 people joined the parties and brought along over 280 items for repair. We clocked up lots of smiley faces on our flip charts recording the repairs, with over 50% of appliances being fixed and a further 25% or so where owners got advice on how they could be fixed with more time and spare parts.
From the events in London we estimate that we have saved nearly 400kg of electrical items from being waste and avoided over 8300kg of carbon dioxide emissions.
Need for more research and mapping
We want to understand how we can make an even bigger environmental impact through our work, through changing people’s behaviour to encourage more repair. So we have linked up with Nottingham Trent University on a research project to learn more about what the people coming along to our events think about repair and what would make it easier from them to do more. Watch this space for more.
Additionally, almost everywhere we went last autumn, we had a very warm welcome from people unable to find another route for finding help with repair.
To address this problem we started a new initiative to map out repair businesses – learn more in this podcast with our researcher James Diamond, of Hackney Fixers. We’ll be sharing our findings in coming months.