Repairing to the Café
To celebrate International Repair Day on 21st October 2023, we report on our trip to our local Repair Café.
This post has been brewing for a while now. Since 2022’s overview of the European report sector told us ‘the future prospects for businesses operating in the repair sector do not look that attractive’, and the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management’s (CIWM) noteworthy Beyond Waste called out the industrialisation of repair as being a big Net Zero To Do, we’ve been keen to take a look at UK repair sector to get a feel for what’s going on.
Certainly, we’re aware of the repair shops for things like mobile phones, and most of us know (or at least know somebody who knows) a man (usually) who can sort out the PC when it goes on the blink. Likewise, we can read the big picture about the Right to Repair movement and its plod through European Parliament. We can even study the detail of the French Repairability Index to find out how that’s getting on. But what about the findings of the CIWM that:
…we need more support in reuse and repair [which] is still heavily reliant on volunteers and is not yet at a point of commercial viability for many items.
Source: CIWM, March 2023.
So, here we go with a look at the volunteer repair sector, albeit with a small sample size (of one) and a bike ride into our home city – which, in our defence, we have found to be a pretty good yardstick in many instances for what’s going on elsewhere…
Image: TGE
Portsmouth’s Repair Café occupies a retail unit in the Cascades Shopping Centre in the city centre. Its Repairer-in-Chief, Clare Seek, explains how she set up the Café five years ago and operated it as a monthly popup in a local community centre. But earlier this year Cascades management donated the unit for the Café’s use until a new paying tenant might come along. Like our post last year on Barter for Things, another example of vacated retail units being creatively repurposed. Clare tells us that moving into the retail unit has been a good thing for visibility: “People walk in, thinking we're a shop.”
She continues, ”There are amazing repair businesses across the city. If you've got a phone or a laptop or you want your trousers taken up, there are people that have these skills and do it as a business. But there's no business in the city that fixes a kettle.”
The Portsmouth Repair Café is part of the Repair Café network, which was started in Amsterdam around 15 years ago by Martine Postma, a Dutch environmentalist and former journalist. Now, there are something like 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide, Clare explains that they come in different shapes and sizes, from a couple of folks in a garden shed to more established entities like hers. But the ethos is very much around helping people to fix their own things which, now that Portsmouth’s Repair Café has a high street presence, can mean some wanderers-in wander out again. Clare again: “Some people walk out and say, no, I haven't got time for that. But they are in the minority. And we have to change that idea”.
The Repair Café network is, in turn, part of the Open Repair Alliance, an international group ‘committed to working towards a world where electrical and electronic products are more durable and easier to repair’. Other members of the alliance include Germany’s Foundation anstiftung and the US-based Fixit Clinic. It’s interesting to note that Repair Café Wales has its own listing in the Alliance and Clare explains that the Welsh and Scottish administrations both have a more forward view of this particular sector than we see in England. Another reason to devolve Net Zero funding away from the workings of Westminster and Whitehall, perhaps.
Sticking with the Open Repair Alliance for a minute, we found an interesting data set from them the other week which we couldn’t resisting putting up on the Green Edge Data Portal. The data set contains over one hundred thousand individual repair records from across the Alliance, and we'd noticed in particular how items like coffee machines had much better fix rates in countries like The Netherlands (56.0%), Belgium (45.9%), Germany (44.4%), Denmark (43.9%) and even those café-guzzlers in France (37.2%) than here in Britan (30.9%).
Image: TGE with data from Open Repair Alliance.
Clare confirms that Repair Café Portsmouth uploads to this data set and also casts a bit of light on our coffee machine observation: “A lot of people acquired coffee makers during Covid because their coffee shops weren't open and they were really cheap. But a lot of things like irons and coffee machines are hard to repair and you can’t get spare parts for them”.
But many things do get fixed and, alongside its data uploads to the Alliance, Clare’s team also records its successes in a slightly less database-y but more visually entertaining way:
Image: TGE
As we chat across one of the Café’s refurbished tables with their re-upholstered chairs, Clare explains a little more about her involvement in the wider voluntary repair sector. With a background in marketing at IBM, she’s used her business and networking skills to help others in the area to set up shop, and there is now a county council-supported Hampshire Repair Café network. Portsmouth City Council is verbally supportive, but apart from a relaxation in business rates commensurate with the charity – Share (Portsmouth) – Clare has now set up around the Repair Café and its sister operation, the Library of Things, that’s about as far as it goes. Another example of the rubber hitting the road with regards to London Government’s general uselessness in putting money for things like this into the regions, we feel.
Across the wider UK voluntary repair sector, there’s also the Community Repair Network and the Restart Project, whose 2018 Manchester Declaration is about to be updated in conjunction with International Repair Day on 21st October 2023. And, internationally, things are starting to move; we already mentioned the Right to Repair bill ambling through European Parliament and, in some quarters at least, there’s a degree of surprise that the French government managed to implement its repairability index over the course of just two or three years. South Africa implemented Right to Repair guidelines for the automotive aftermarket back in 2021, while Clare tells us that much of the R2R push in Australia is coming from the farming community asking ‘why do we have tractors that we can’t fix anymore’.
But here in the UK, the concern has to be e-waste from domestic appliances and devices. Most of us – hands up, we do! – are hoarding gold in old phones sitting in a drawer somewhere, while many of our appliances like coffee machines and hair dryers don’t have screw casings that give them even a chance of being fixed. Hopefully, at some time in the not-too-distant future, the Design Council’s Design for Planet thinking we described in our recent post will kick in, backed by policy and legislation that pushes manufacturers towards the type of industrialised repair that CIWM identifies as being so important for the future. Until then, though, the depressing fact is that in per capita terms, Britain is the second-highest producer of e-waste in the world and is poised to take over from Norway in the top slot, perhaps as soon as next year. The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) inquired into this in 2020 and published shortly thereafter, and the Government replied in 2021. It’s unclear what’s happened since.
In the meantime, we wish Clare Seek and her team the best as Repair Café Portsmouth continues to operate and grow in its spot in the Cascades Shopping Centre. Although Clare does tell us that they’re still doing the monthly popups, to keep Repair Café accessible across the city and continue to help people do the right thing repair-wise!
There is a bigger question here, which is: how can a culture of repair truly be established in a society that is continually being fed the mantra of growth?
We all know that growth economies rely on continuous consumption and increased production, prioritising GDP and encouraging people to buy new products and discard old ones. A repair culture, on the other hand, promotes the idea of making products last longer and encourages consumers to make more thoughtful and durable purchases, which may in turn actually slow down economic turnover.
Of course, there is the widely-accepted concept of ‘green’ or sustainable growth, as embodied in the UN’s 17 goals. But honestly, do we see evidence of that in the thinking of our current political class and their use of economic growth as a weapon in their wars of words?
As we’ve said before, The Green Edge prefers to remain sceptically apolitical, asking instead whether society and the system itself might the problem here. But we are also realists; society is what it is, for now at least, and the need is urgent. If there is no political will to dampen demand – as we’ve seen with things as far removed as air travel and meat eating – then how can more electronic goods be moved around the virtuous circles of second use rather than dumped in the bin of e-waste?
The big boys are on the ball, of course. We have Apple Certified Refurbished and Samsung Certified Renewed. In the marketplaces, we have Amazon Renewed – slightly ironic since many may argue the likes of Amazon are a big part of the problem in the first place. And then there are the marketplaces specifically set up for refurbished goods, like the B Corp BackMarket – plenty of coffee machines there, we note – together with the old chestnuts eBay (80% of which are new goods these days), Gumtree and so on.
What are we missing? From direct experience, many of us will know that unwanted clothing will be readily taken – repaired or otherwise – in some of the countries to which we may be travelling. To what extent might this be replicated for refurbished electronic items, within the current network of import / export rules for different countries and without the problem identified by the EAC, that as much as 40% of the UK’s electronic waste may be getting illegally shipped overseas where much of it is dumped?
We have no answer right now. Perhaps some of our readers might let us know their thoughts.
Our thanks to Clare Seek and Share (Portsmouth) for their hospitality and time in preparing this article.