A blog post written by the ReStart project, winners of the Digital Communities award at the 2023 European Prize for Citizen Science and coordinators of the Beyond Recycling of Ewaste project, part of the 2024 IMPETUS Accelerator programme.
This October marks 15 years since the world’s first repair café was held by Dutch journalist Martine Postma.
In holding the first community run repair event, she sparked a global movement in which communities are (literally) taking matters into their own hands to reject our throwaway economy.
Now we’re telling the story of the rise of community repair. After logging data from more than 200,000 repair attempts across 31 countries over 12 years, we’re releasing a report exploring the rise of the community repair movement, and what that data tells us (more detail below).
This highlights the need for government reuse targets to ensure more products are kept in use – targets that are supported by 85% of people.
It also shows the importance of community repair, which fills a gap and provides an opportunity for people to give their things a second life.
This October we’re celebrating the brilliant repair cafés that are helping people across the world to give their things a second life. We’re seeing repair-themed cakes, we’re watching politicians become repair enthusiasts, and we’re seeing communities take part in the joy of repair. Over 100 fixing events will happen across the UK, from Glasgow to Cardiff; Belfast to Bristol.
Around the world, over 1800 events are planned in over 35 countries from India to Ukraine, the Philippines to Mexico. Activities include 15th birthday celebrations for Repair Cafe International, an open air repair café in the Grand-Place in Brussels, a webinar with an EU commissioner by Right to Repair Europe, repair training courses for refugees in Uganda, and a talk by the Australian Repair Network in Brisbane.
Repair day is Saturday 19th October: Join us in celebrating repair this weekend – and the rest of October. Find resources here.
What do the reports tell us?
The first Open Repair Alliance report shows rapid growth and huge public enthusiasm for repairs.
In the most recent set of Open Repair Alliance data, there are: 208,491 repair attempts of electrical and electronic items from 19,986 events run by 1,158 community repair groups across 31 countries.
In the last 12 months, from August 2023 to July 2024, the Open Repair Alliance logged nearly 70,000 repair attempts for electronic and electrical items.
That means nearly 6,000 have been logged each month – nearly 200 repair attempts daily!
Using this data, we can estimate the scale of electrical repair attempts in community repair events across the world. Assuming there are at least 4,000 repair groups around the world, this dataset captures only around 20% of the total electrical repairs performed at community events.
This means there are likely to be approximately 30,000 repair attempts each month, or around 1,000 per day. And a whopping 190,000 successful repairs every year.
Photo: Mark A Phillips
Highlighting the huge gap in right to repair legislation
What this data tells us is just how far we have to go before Right to Repair legislation helps us to keep the vast majority of products in use.
Our data shows the main barriers community fixers come up against when repairing products: spare parts not being available is the top barrier (25% of cases) followed by them being too expensive (18%), then not being repairable design (16%).
Only 40 products out of the over 208,000 logged so far, or 0.0002% are covered by existing EU legislation. This is because the most established regulations are for white goods and TVs. People don’t tend to bring dishwashers and fridges into repair cafes! And only a tiny minority of the TVs brought in are recent enough to be covered (introduced to the market from March 2021).
Expanded rules will provide Right to Repair for smartphones and tablets from June 2025, so we have yet to benefit from those. And many products seen at events are well beyond 10 years old. But these are products that simply aren’t supported by existing right to repair legislation.
Beyond Recycling of Electricals: What’s happening in the UK’s waste facilities?
Last year we discovered that nearly half of the electronic and electrical devices brought for recycling at one household reuse and recycling centre were either fully functional or only needed a light repair. But instead of being repaired and reused, they were sent to the shredder for recycling, representing a missed opportunity to reduce waste, lower emissions and save households money.
This year we wanted to learn how widespread this missed opportunity is across the whole of the UK. So we conducted a citizen science project to gauge what people want to see happen to the things they bring to waste facilities, map the reuse streams available at these sites, and outline what policy changes could help us move beyond recycling. Because reusing these products could reduce waste, lower emissions and save households money.
We found that repair and reuse are incredibly popular among the general public. When asked what they thought should happen to electrical products in good condition that are brought to waste facilities, 85% of respondents to a YouGov survey conducted for this report thought they should be kept in use through being repaired/refurbished (38%) or donated/sold (47%). Only 6% of respondents thought these products should be recycled (full results here).
But despite public expectations, we found that only around half of UK waste facilities (51%) offer any kind of reuse stream for unwanted products. Even where such provision exists, the types of products accepted tend to be limited: less than a fifth (18%) offer a reuse stream for small electronic and electrical equipment. And in most cases, repair is rare for small electronic and electrical equipment (less than 2% of sites).
How can we scale up reuse and repair?
The responsibility for this lack of reuse sits firmly in the hands of national policy. Reuse and repair are widely acknowledged to be more efficient than recycling. But there are no binding requirements or incentives for manufacturers, the public sector or waste management industry, to prioritise reuse.
Although recycling targets and the current Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requirements include reuse, they inadvertently put manufacturers and local authorities off investing in redistributing reusable items. With a far more established system and the challenge of meeting targets, the emphasis has been on recycling. Without specific reuse targets, local authorities have few real incentives to invest in redistributing usable products.
We’re calling for reuse targets: binding requirements to increase reuse in collaboration with local reuse and repair initiatives, separate from recycling targets. Only then will we see the resources, space and creative thinking needed to build an economy around reuse at scale.
Reuse targets and right-to-repair legislation for all products are two of the policies that we’re calling for in our Repair and Reuse Declaration. We’re delighted to see more than 350 businesses, institutions, and repair cafes support it, and a growing number of MPs and councils, too. Here’s to many more signing up to support this repair day.
Photo: Mark A Phillips
Learn a little more about… the Beyond E-Waste Project.
We recycle thousands of working and repairable devices every week in the UK. But fixing or reusing them instead could reduce waste, lower emissions, and save households money.
So, with support from the 2024 IMPETUS Accelerator Programme, BREW is investigating what reuse options are available at household waste and recycling centres (HWRCs) and the challenges of making reuse more widely available.
Together, they will map the reuse at these waste facilities across the UK and release their data for anyone to see. BREW will also produce national policy recommendations to help us move beyond e-waste recycling.
Last year, BREW spent a week testing every electronic and electrical device brought to a household reuse and recycling centre in London for shredding. And, shockingly, they found that almost half of them could have been reused instead.
While many products should be recycled, many should live a longer or second life in the hands and homes of people who can use them. By focusing so heavily on recycling, we are missing opportunities to reduce waste, lower emissions, avoid discarding valuable resources, and save households money by shifting to strategies further up the waste hierarchy, such as waste prevention, repair, and reuse.
”“Reuse and repair are more important than ever. The UK’s Net Zero ambitions will require fully sustainable management of resources and energy, while the country has an increasing responsibility to contain pollutants arising from e-waste and other products. […] We are keen to see initiatives launched at a national level to support local authorities in enhancing reuse services at household waste and recycling centres, as well as more opportunities within local communities for citizens to donate, acquire or repair products as part of a growing and sustainable Circular Economy.”
— Jon Hastings, Chair of The National Association of Waste Disposal Officers (NAWDO)
