Repairing connections - embedding a culture of repair

Alex Brinded finds out more about the international Repair Café movement and the volunteers engineering its growth.

Retired aircraft electrical engineer Clive Handy, as he is aptly called, and I sit on a wooden church pew in Farnham, UK, while volunteers around us pack away their equipment following the latest, local Repair Café session.

The heat from a blazing June sunshine is watered down by the stained-glass windows behind us and cooled by the vaulted stone ceiling. Handy reaches forward to take his well-deserved certificate celebrating the team’s 2000th repair off the table in front of us, just in time for it to be hastily collapsed for whatever church event follows.

At the next table, the last repair of the day is taking place – a mother has brought her young son and his toy electronic xylophone. It is being studied by the volunteer repairer with the care and attention of a jeweller examining a valuable piece.

Handy, like the other repairers here, gives up one Saturday a month to attend this Farnham church and fix items belonging to strangers. Like many retired engineers, he has skills to share.

Professor Martin Charter, the creator of Farnham Café, points out, 'When you repair something, you also repair a memory…It does repair life experiences. Products that were maybe given by a grandfather that were broken and repaired.'

Handy says it can therefore be unexpectedly moving. 'A lady brought a toy in earlier and Russ fixed it, and this lady hadn’t heard this sound since she was 10 years old, and she burst into tears. She had written down the words of what it should sound like perfectly apart from one line - and this memory was written back from 40 odd years ago.'

In the beginning…

Indeed, this local outfit is part of a wider international movement. The first Repair Café to go by that name was started in the Netherlands in 2009 by a Dutch journalist, Martine Postma. As well as writing about waste reduction and prevention, Postma was involved in local politics in the eastern part of Amsterdam, and recalls advocating for more trees, less waste and more sustainable lifestyles.

'I also noticed that the streets were full of thrown away items every week when garbage was collected. And this amazed and annoyed me because I noticed that so many perfectly good items were thrown away…So, I wanted to do more.'

She started by writing a pamphlet with advice on where old things such as computers could be recycled. Realising there needed to be more places to take broken items, she ran a test Repair Café in October 2009.

At first, she was only able to recruit the husband of one of her oldest friends as a repairer – 'a real tinkerer…the most handy person I know'. But soon she found a carpenter who knew a seamstress, as well as inviting members of a computer club and a bicycle repairer to join her pop-up.

As Postma recalls, 'It turned out to be a huge success…For me it was all to do with waste reduction, but it turned out to be a very social thing…when you have an object on the table, it [brings up] the folks’ stories that are connected to it. Like where did you get the product? Did someone give it to you?

'There are memories attached to items causing the owner to want to keep them…We see many Repair Cafés that are primarily about meeting each other.'

Often objects are not as broken as people think and might only need cleaning or replacing a single part. This can be 'a real eye opener. What we see a lot is that someone comes in, they sit down with a volunteer, they fix the product and then they are really amazed…They have done it themselves with their own hands. This makes people feel good – it makes them feel proud and strong. And I think that is the kind of mentality that we need for a sustainable future, a sustainable circular society. You need people who are confident that they can solve a problem, who are not afraid to work, to have a look, to use their hands, to be creative, to be inventive. And that is what the Repair Café kindles I think, so it is a very positive thing'.

For the volunteers, she adds, 'It is a way to stay involved in the community and to be seen, to be appreciated'. She says many volunteers stay a long time, become friends and look out for each other.

From a seed…

Towards the end of the first café, people were still arriving with broken items only to be disappointed to find out it was a one-off. Postma was contacted by people from all over the Netherlands who wanted to meet and find out how to set up their own café.

Realising that she couldn’t have coffee with everyone, and that it was expensive for her to act as a consultant, she instead wrote a manual. This forms the backbone of her starter kit today, which is available in five languages and enables anyone to start their own Repair Café in their local community. The manual encourages readers to ’translate’ the advice to their own situation and use their own local expertise. This works very well, Postma says. 'When people feel that they own the concept, they feel responsible for everything turning out right.'

While most Repair Cafés operate once a month, some open more often, even several days a week – although that is often alongside a thrift store.

For how it caught the public imagination, Postma points to external events. 'The first café coincided with the economic crisis, then more environmental consciousness and climate change, and now a cost-of-living crisis and the war in Ukraine.'

This low-key movement may not preach a lifestyle or be leaning on the environmental panic button, but it is still underpinned by strong principles. Postma thinks globalisation has been a real driver of a deficit in repair culture. 'Producers think it is not worthwhile to make these products repairable because they are being thrown away after a limited period,' which reduces the availability of spare parts too.

She continues, 'People think it is normal that when something breaks, you order a new one on the internet and it will be on your doorstep within 24 hours…it is not normal. I think we are really beginning to see that we cannot go on this way because we are getting into very serious environmental and social problems.'

On the EU Right to Repair rules (see above), Postma wants them to include more product types, not only washing machines, fridges, TVs, and smartphones, but also coffee makers, vacuum cleaners and radios. 'I think everything should be repairable and everyone should have the right to repair their own products.'

She believes spare parts should be widely available and affordable, with glueing or melting of casings banned in favour of assembly with normal screws. 'There could be a lot of repair labour, which could be very profitable and could be very helpful for the GDP.'

The report, Re-use – seizing the opportunity, from waste management company Suez, estimates that if every person had just one item repaired every year, this would require 40,000 jobs across the UK.

Ripple effects

Back to Charter, who is also Director of the Centre for Sustainable Design at the University for Creative Arts in Farnham, and Head of Circular Economy for the British Standards Institute. As founder of England’s first Repair Café in Farnham, he is impressed by the adaptability and attitude of those he works with. A previous repairer was a serial entrepreneur who retrained himself in furniture restoration.

'[They] bring a lifetime of experience, particularly the engineers,' Charter reflects. Yet he observes it is difficult to find out what skills they have at times. 'A lot of them have more skills than we/they think.'

'We had a guy working for a long time on bicycles and then it transpired that he had been a broadcast engineer for Sony, and so he then switched from bicycles across to electrical.'

'[They all have] different steers and industries and bring a lot of knowledge – you have always got someone you can ask for advice. It is a very collaborative and cooperative situation,' Handy adds.

Charter describes the engineers as just loving to solve problems effectively, and that they even have to stop one of their volunteers taking home too many products.

Handy testifies to the benefits. 'Since I have left work, this keeps me in touch with my skills. I am basically an electro-mechanical engineer. I can take anything apart mechanically. I am 72 now and still finding out new stuff and it keeps your brain ticking over.'

Charter started the café after a European project on Makers, Modifiers and Fixers, and working with micro-SMEs on themes like the circular economy and eco-innovation.

With 100 conference attendees, he sensed the momentum and wanted to put the theory into practice.

He also met Postma and found the Repair Café concept interesting, a good thing to do, a way to connect the university with the community, and a living lab – from which research and chapters in some books have been produced. He notes that a lot of academics and policymakers do not get involved in the grassroots at all, and that was a strong motivation.

So, what has he learnt? From the engineers themselves, perhaps a different perspective. Having assumed that there were generally two types of creativity, the problem-solvers and more traditional creative types, the engineers have shown how they can come up with lateral solutions.

'Would I do it again. Yes, because personally it’s been great to see the initiative grow. It’s great to see the positive impact on the repairers, the volunteers, and particularly a couple of the young people that we involve…It’s incredible to see the skillsets…sitting there in communities.' It is also one of the dwindling places in society where the different generations meet. They used to have a 90-year-old repairer while a new recruit who is 'excellent' is aged just 15.

They have had around 4,500 people visit the café in Farnham so far and are proud of their diversions from landfill. While a survey of 100 customers revealed that people do pick things up from working with a volunteer repairer, and gain confidence in repairing things themselves. 'Actually, it has rekindled my faith in people in many ways,' muses Charter. 'I don’t necessarily meet loads of people [in the local community] in my day-to-day life…it connects me back to the community.'

Green shoots

Charter highlights, however, the role of product design and future policy. We certainly see the vast majority of products are not designed for ease of disassembly and recyclability and I think there’s a sort of growing concern and recognition of that, and some people have started to get quite angry.' He believes if businesses have the capability to design for repairability to extend the life of a product, then they should do that.

Anecdotally, many of the fixers identify problems of product obsolescence. 'Things like radio are almost irreparable. They build for production not repair. Our whole ethos is about repairing stuff, but manufacturers have made it difficult to get apart. They always say buy a new one which is what we are up against,' reports Handy.

Charter ponders, 'It comes back down to what should the economy and society look like?...One thing I remember that was fed back when we did the European Repair Café conference is somebody said, ‘well aren’t Repair Cafés what communities and societies should look like? People, trying to support other people, reducing environmental impact and creating a positive environment.’'

Having been part of campaign groups before, Charter sees this as different. 'This a much more modern pragmatic form of environmentalism. It’s about solving problems rather than waving a flag about. I think there’s something changing there, and maybe younger engineers will be more engaged with it.'

The Repair Café starter kit is available here