The Restart Project Blog: Recent Episodes

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Let's fix our relationship with electronics

We are so excited to announce that we’ve been awarded £1.27 million in National Lottery funding, in partnership with climate action charity Possible, to bring our innovative Fixing Factories to three new high streets across London over three years.

What is a Fixing Factory?In 2022, we launched two Fixing Factory pilots in Brent and Camden, creating spaces where people can bring in broken electronics and appliances to be fixed for free, while gaining the skills they need to make repairs themselves in the future.

Fixing Factories generate public interest in repair. They create a series of stepping stones to take people from never having looked inside an electrical item towards, if they wish, fixing for others. They are designed to empower local communities by teaching people how to repair their own stuff. They give broken products a second lease of life, saving people money whilst helping reduce carbon emissions by avoiding the need for new items.

Why do we need a Fixing Factory on every highstreet?We know that the UK public would love to repair their things more, 73% of Londoners have expressed a willingness to repair items rather than replace them if the process was more straightforward while nearly the same amount of people would like to learn repair skills to save money. But accessibility remains a hurdle. Nearly two-thirds of people in London say there is a scarcity of nearby repair shops, and it’s too expensive and hard to find other options.

That’s where Fixing Factories come in.

Fixing Factories have already engaged nearly 1,000 people in community repair sessions, saving 1.5 tonnes of e-waste and 40 tonnes of CO2e over the last 2 years.

With this funding we will be able to expand the Fixing Factory network across London over the next three years. We’ll open 3 new sites in Acton, Haringey and either Hackney or Islington, and keep our flagship site in Camden open.

The four sites will develop blueprints for future Fixing Factories, supporting a vision to bring affordable fixing and repair to high streets and communities in the UK.

Can you help us find a home?We have the funding, now we’re looking for a home!

Could you help us with our search for a space in Hackney or Islington?

Please get in touch with shelini@therestartproject.org if you know of anywhere!

A huge thank you to National Lottery, Climate Action Fund and National Lottery playersThis project would not be possible without the grant awarded by the National Lottery, Climate Action Fund, a £100 million commitment over 10 years from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes.

The post We’ve been awarded over £1m of National Lottery funding to roll out community Fixing Factories to more London high streets! appeared first on The Restart Project.

This guest post is by Frank Schoofs, organiser of the Marlow Repair Café and founder of The Repair Finder Ltd.

Summer is music festival season. The news is full of people having fun and dancing. However, the news is also full of pictures of litter and broken or abandoned items strewn across the festival grounds. In fact, 58% of festivalgoers report that they have left, lost or broken something at a festival.

Reducing waste and increasing the life of ‘stuff’ in an easily accessible, affordable way is exactly what the community repair movement is about. There are thousands of Repair Cafés or Restart Parties across the world, including over 600 in the UK alone. Could a “community repair tent” work at a festival too? Would we be able to repair things there and then? Would people even use such a service if it was offered? Which festival would be suitable to trial this?

The Cambridge Folk Festival is not too big (approximately 10,000 visitors), but, crucially, it already has a strong focus on environmental impact. In 2023, it received an Outstanding Certification from A Greener Future. When I pitched the repair concept to the organisers, they were enthusiastic – always a good start! The local community repair umbrella organisation, Cambridge Carbon Footprint, also jumped on board, allowing us to use their insurance policy, renting us a “stock” toolkit for the duration of the event and connecting us into their pool of amazing local volunteers.

And so, on Thursday 25th July, we opened our Community Repair Corner at a music festival, running from 10 am to 5 pm each day. The festival organisers gave us a prime location: a spacious gazebo, right on the approach to the main arena entrance. That meant nearly everyone had to walk past us.

The response was unanimously positive. People walked up to just have a chat about community repair, find their nearest Repair Café or even to ask how they could volunteer with one. Others shuffled up with a “I don’t think you could repair this but…”. In a few cases, visitors knew exactly what needed doing, but just did not have the tools available – so we loaned them tools so they could do the fix themselves.

However, once the reputation of the repair volunteers’ skills got out, the confidence of our visitors increased too. Over four days, we did 133 repairs – and only had to give up on 3 items.

The most common repairs were:

Collapsed camping chairs (with metal posts)
The “shoulder” seams worn on folding “seat” camping chairs
Clothing, bags or rucksacks tears, rips, or broken zips
Glasses (sunglasses or prescription)
Holes in air beds or tents
Shoes with bits coming loose

We also fixed an inflatable unicorn from the kids paddling pool, star-gazing binoculars, a mobility scooter and an artist’s golden jacket 45 minutes before their main stage performance!

People would walk by on subsequent days and give a big thumbs up: “still working!” The best and most concise endorsement came a from a group of passers-by one evening, when the curtains were closed, but our sign was still out: “Repair corner… F*** yeah!”

I believe that our Community Repair Corner served three main purposes:

Reduced waste at the festival by (at least temporarily) repairing items.
Improved people’s experience at the festival, by (at least temporarily) repairing chairs, glasses, airbeds, umbrellas, clothing.
Increased awareness of the (community) repair movement, linking with visitors’ local Repair Café(s). People could observe a Repair Café in a relaxed, open environment, without needing to go to one. Once they see and understand what it is, they are more inclined to visit.

The organisers, visitors and volunteers buzzing afterwards and keen to make the Corner a permanent fixture at future Cambridge Folk Festivals!

A huge thank you to Becky, Hazel, Ella (Cambridge Folk Festival), Sandy (Cambridge Carbon Footprint), Ali, Clive, Gina, Jon, Mark, Mike, Louise, Sam, Tessa (volunteers) for helping to make it happen.

Which other festivals will follow suit and set up a Community Repair Corner?

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All images from Frank Schoofs, Marlow Repair Café

The post Guest post: Community repair at a music festival appeared first on The Restart Project.

With a new government in place, we’re ready to pick up the campaign for a UK right to repair!

Please use this opportunity to welcome your newly elected MP and invite them to celebrate repair with you.

The new government presents an opportunity to achieve a real circular economy for the UK, centring repair and reuse. But with talk of the circular economy largely absent from the election campaign and the Labour manifesto, our challenge is the same: we need to build political support for repair and reuse and get it onto the agenda.

So we’ve gathered signatures from supporting organisations and have written to Sir Keir Starmer, highlighting the policies we’re calling for in the Repair and Reuse Declaration. See our joint letter here.

But our real power is in the growing movement that is championing repair and reuse. We know that MPs care about the repair cafes in their constituencies. We know that MPs and Lords alike have become champions of repair after experiencing the joys of their local repair cafes or refurb businesses.

And our opportunity to win over more MPs and show them the joys and benefits of repair and reuse starts now. With Repair Day only 3 months away, we have a chance to invite our newly elected MPs along to see what we do, why repair is important, and why it needs political support. October also marks 15 years since the first repair cafe, so the timing couldn’t be better.

We’ve designed a printable or online congratulations card for you to send your MP on behalf of your Repair Café or repair business. You can send an online card, or, even better, print one for your repair group and colleagues to all sign, and send it in the post.

We all know that MPs will be bombarded at the moment, so the more creative you can be with your letter or card, the better. Could you make something for them to put on their wall or sit on their desk, which will remind them of you every day?

Find out more about how to get involved in repair day here.

The post Let’s get repair and reuse on the new government’s agenda for Repair Day appeared first on The Restart Project.

This article first appeared on Forbes.com

New right-to-repair laws in Europe aim to reduce waste, extend product lifespans, and move us past “throw-away” mindsets and products (think: single use plastics, fast fashion, smartphone upgrades). To learn more about the moment and what’s ahead, Ashoka’s Maria Razquin caught up with Ugo Vallauri, co-founder of The Restart Project in the U.K., an organization that focuses on repair and electronics—the fastest growing source of waste in the world.

Maria Razquin: Ugo, you are saying that every product should be repairable and that repairs should be accessible and affordable for everyone. What is your starting point?

Ugo Vallauri: At the most basic level, we want to fix our relationship with the products we buy. This means regaining the confidence to repair products when they break and reconnecting with the “why” this should be a priority. We can all extend the lifespans of the products we own and appreciate the environmental impact of the materials involved in production. At The Restart Project, we also celebrate the power of communities to bring back repair for everyone. We do this through restart parties and repair events throughout the UK. In parallel, we work on legislative changes that can only be achieved by collective will and data drawn from across the movement. The higher-level goal is to consume less, consume better, and reduce our need for new materials.

Razquin: It’s a big moment for repairability in Europe, with the EU taking concrete steps. Tell us more.

Vallauri: Yes, it’s an important moment. We’re starting to see the results of the work that we and others have put in for years. We’re proud to have co-founded the European Right to Repair campaign, a coalition that has grown to include over 150 organizations pushing for ambitious legislation to support the consumer’s right to repair. Product design is one element. So, for example, any entity that wants to sell or distribute a product within the European Union must make that product more repairable by increasing the number of spare parts available, providing repair information and tools required, and so on—or in the case of smartphones, supporting the devices with software updates for at least five years. This change will go into effect in June 2025, while it’s already the case for appliances like washing machines. Most products are not covered yet, though, from headphones to printers and e-bikes, so we need to keep pushing so that every product is repairable.

Razquin: What about plain old durability and building products that last?

Vallauri: Also key. Phones will need to be built to withstand more falls before the screen breaks. Batteries that retain capacity for more cycles will be mandated. And starting in 2027, most electronics will need to be designed with user-replaceable batteries—devices are too often abandoned because replacing the battery is complicated or costly. Manufacturers are lobbying the European Union (EU) for exemptions for this, so it’s essential that organizations like us keep watching! Also, the EU will introduce an online mapping platform listing repair and buyback options, to make repair options visible. But we are concerned that new legislation might not sufficiently tackle the high cost of repairs.

Razquin: Are there examples where repairability has been effectively incentivized? Which countries are leading the way and what can we learn from them?

Vallauri: Yes. We’re seeing financial incentives that make repair far less costly and more attractive. Some exciting examples already exist in Austria, France, and parts of Germany, where repair bonuses and vouchers cut repair costs by up to 50%. This makes a big difference—not only for future products but for products people already own.

Razquin: Digital access and inclusion is another goal of the repair movement. How does making technology that lasts longer expand access?

Vallauri: Whenever you extend the life of a product, it also means that a product one person no longer needs can become useful to another person who can’t afford a brand-new product, locally or globally. But right now, communities with limited financial resources are too often stuck in a trap of buying either non-durable, throw-away products, or second-hand devices that quickly become no longer supported and obsolete So, repair laws will help global digital access.

Ugo speaking at a Right to Repair protest in Brussels in 2022.Razquin: What other global impacts do you anticipate?

Vallauri: We expect that the new European legislation will have an impact beyond the region. Manufacturers will be less likely to make two versions of the same product—one for the EU and another for outside the EU. So, designing for durability and repairability will become more prevalent and we hope eventually the new normal in design, manufacturing and post-sale consumer services. As for things like software support and updates, manufacturers will likely make these accessible to consumers beyond Europe. Refurbished products will become more useful globally, reducing overall electronic waste. If a smartphone with support that lasts for 10 years ends up in a different region of the world as a refurbished product, that refurbished product will be more attractive and useful for longer if it’s fully supported.

Razquin: Inspiring changes! What can everyday consumers do to support this shift to more repairability and durability?

Vallauri: You can start with three things. One, everyone can care and help friends and family care. This is what we’re talking about when we say, “fixing our relationship with electronics.” So, this means maintaining the products you own and trying to protect them from breaking in the first place—making the most of what we already have access to. Two, consider seeking out your local community repair group. I think you’ll find it truly transformational to learn to fix things with the help of someone in your community with more experience. There are thousands of community repair groups across Europe, and the movement is growing globally. You can find many of the groups listed on The Restart Project’s website and on partners such as Repair Cafe International. And three, start to observe and interrogate the over-production and consumption around us. In the same way that you think twice about taking a single use plastic fork or bag, start noticing the compromises we are pushed to make. Tap into existing movements, such as our European coalition. Also, in the U.K., The Restart Project is advocating for a Repair and Reuse Declaration. In the U.S., there’s a strong and growing right to repair movement. And if you live elsewhere and want to bring the repair movement to your country, please get in touch. We would love to connect you to active parts of the movement.

Razquin: Ugo, looking ahead, what would you like to see emerge and become the new norm—and conversely, what habits and mindsets do you imagine disappearing as the repair movement advances?

Vallauri: I want to see manufacturers move away from releasing new versions of the same product so frequently and instead focus on supporting and updating each version for longer. I’d like to see all single-use, throw-away products disappear. And I hope we can all look forward to better access to what we really need—and not be surrounded by noise and useless products! The result will be that we can all participate mindfully in our digital society, while reducing the shocking amount of e-waste we generate.

Ugo Vallauri is an Ashoka Fellow. You can read more about his work here.

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

[Feature image by Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

The post The Power of Repair: Tackling The Throwaway Economy appeared first on The Restart Project.

Yesterday, we took repair into Parliament. After months of red tape, we walked through the gates of parliament with a bag full of tools and some big ideas about how politicians can make repair and reuse easier and more affordable for everyone in the UK.

We were delighted to be able to do actual fixing with and for MPs and their staffers, and those at the event got to experience the joy of a repaired hairdryer whirring into life.

But in reality the fixing was just a part of the experience. What made it such a brilliant event was the buzz of bringing almost 30 MPs together with a microcosm of the movement behind the Repair and Reuse Declaration. We partnered with the brilliant Back Market to create the event, and they, alongside SUEZ recovery and recycling UK and Replace Base brought the business perspective of repair. We had support from our campaigning allies Green Alliance and The Design Council and (the stars of the show) repair cafe representatives from across the nation.

It was striking how many MPs came to meet their local repair cafe – or came because one of their constituents asked them to come along. It was inspiring how many of the MPs are genuinely supportive of repair and reuse – the sponsoring MP Helen Hayes nailed it when she said that this is an issue that is so obvious it gets forgotten. And it was brilliant to see more than 10 of the MPs endorse the Repair and Reuse Declaration then and there.

The event was inspiring, impactful, and it felt like a real life snapshot of the growing movement behind right to repair in the UK.

The post We brought the repair movement to Parliament appeared first on The Restart Project.

An important part of our work in London is supporting and building the network of repair groups. There are currently over 30 groups in London, but some boroughs aren’t represented yet. One of our goals is to ensure there is a group in every area in London so people from all parts of London can access repair!

Here’s how we did it in Islington…

Islington fixersWe worked with Islington Council to jump start the community led repair group ‘Islington Fixers’. The group is now led by the wonderful Bel from Islington Climate Centre, who will be hosting repair events at the Climate Centre and other locations around the borough.

Before this, Islington Council’s waste minimisation team were organising repair events around the borough to celebrate key dates like Repair Week and Earth Day. However, they recognised that supporting a community group to take ownership would encourage local residents to get involved more – both with volunteering to fix and bringing stuff in for repair.

Image of fixer and resident at the first event CC: The Restart Project / Mark PhillipsStep 1: Scoping potential partnersUsing our experience of supporting community repair groups in London and the council’s knowledge of the borough, we mapped out potential partners, which included sustainability groups, community associations, and universities.

The group needed to be part of a larger constituted organisation so they could apply for funding, claim expenses etc.

It took around 6 months to find the right partner. Part of the process was gaining insight into what could be done to remove barriers for groups who wanted to get involved.

Image of fixer and resident at the first event
CC: The Restart Project / Mark PhillipsStep 2: Addressing concerns1. Organisations with a fixed location weren’t willing to do pop up events across the borough.

It was important that the entire borough could access the events, so we wanted to find an organisation able to do this. A secondary option was to go with an organisation that had a central and easily accessible location.

Organisations didn’t feel like they had enough capacity to take something like this on.

We organised a community engagement event to bring more volunteers in to share the work, and to find members who are able to host and organise events.

Organisers were worried about finding and managing volunteers

Our solution was to get the group set up on Restart’s community platform Restarters.net which gives events visibility and access to volunteers.

To address this in the short term, the council agreed to pay for fixers via Restart until the group has established a team of volunteers.

Groups were worried about securing funding to run events

The council agreed to contribute a small amount of funds towards the running of each event for things like refreshments and travel expenses

Groups wanted to have a first aider to ensure the events were run safely.

The council put one person from the group through first aid training. This person will attend every event.

Groups wanted to have some basic repair tools to get started with

Fixers usually have their own toolkits which they bring along to events. But we didn’t want a lack of tools to be a barrier for volunteers, so the council contributed towards purchasing a small toolkit. We provided a voucher to purchase tools from ifixit (this offer is open to all new community groups) and we lend out a PAT testing machine to groups in London.

Step 3: Engaging the wider communityAfter finding a fantastic organisation that was willing to take the lead, Islington Climate Centre, the next step was to hold a community engagement event. Interested groups and individuals were able to get to know each other, find out more about the group and get involved.

There was a lot of interest: 20 people attended including several new fixers who hadn’t previously engaged in community repair before and people who wanted to help host, collect data and be part of the organising team.

Step 4: The first eventIslington Fixers ran their first event on Jan 20th 2024. There were 6 fixers and 2 hosts, and 30 people brought in items for fixing. Out of the 31 items brought in, a whopping 48% were fixed, and 45% had their faults diagnosed but will need a spare part or extra time to get them up and running again. This translates to 22 kg of waste and 391 kg of carbon emissions being prevented!

You can read about how it went over on Islington Climate Centre’s website.

Image of two fixers at the first event CC: The Restart Project / Mark PhillipsStep 5: Regular fixing events in IslingtonIslington Fixers will now run at least 6 repair events each year. The council will support them with promotion, finding a venue and choosing the dates. Islington Council will put a core volunteer through first aid training so there is always someone able to administer first aid, and they’ll provide the refreshments and supply a toolkit so new fixers popping in can get stuck in straight away!

Our learnings* A key requirement for starting a volunteer community group is to have a core organising team to plan events, recruit and manage volunteers. * You need to have a good understanding of the borough to build local connections. * The most difficult part of this process was finding a group of volunteers able to take the lead on the project, so you’ll need to allow plenty of time for this. * It’s important to discuss what the strengths and needs of the group are and tailor support accordingly. * The group needed to be constituted to allow them to apply for funding, send invoices etc. * If the ideal lead group isn’t constituted , then the repair group could come under another organisation. For example Hackney Fixers operates under the Sustainable Hackney umbrella. The post How we helped Islington to get fixing appeared first on The Restart Project.

Last year, we spent a week examining every electronic and electrical device brought into a household reuse and recycling centre in West London. We tested hundreds of devices destined for the recycling shredder. And, shockingly, we found that almost half of them could have been reused instead.

As we noted at the time, while lots of products should be recycled, many shouldn’t be anywhere near the recycling bin. Instead they should be living a longer, or a second life in the hands and the homes of people that can use them. By focusing exclusively on recycling, we’re wasting more than we need to. Based on this study, we estimated that over 30,000 perfectly reusable small electrical and electronic products could be “wasted” in recycling skips at Household Waste and Recycling Centres (HWRCs) – every week.

Our experience in West London left us with a lot of questions. But one that’s stuck with us is this…

How many HWRCs actually offer reuse options for electrical devices in the UK?We know that in some parts of the UK, waste authorities and waste management companies are testing out ways to separate reusable items from waste. We’ve even seen some of these in action. But industry insiders tell us that reuse remains rare, especially for electronic and electrical products. If true, this means we’re missing a huge opportunity to reduce waste and make the most of the products we have.

Right now, it’s hard to assess the state of reuse because there is surprisingly little public information about how common these initiatives are across the country. So now we plan to look into this ourselves and we need your help!

Help us answer this questionWe’re looking for volunteers to join us on a deep dive into the world of Household Waste and Recycling Centres. Together we’ll investigate how many offer opportunities to reuse products, and we’ll have conversations with the staff on the ground about their work and the barriers they may face to moving beyond just recycling.

Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about waste management yet. We’ll brief you on everything you need to know.

All you need to take part is an internet-connected device and a sense of curiosity!

If you’d like to learn more, simply complete the form below and we’ll be in touch.

First name(Required)Surname(Required)How would you potentially like to get involved?These options are just to give you an idea of the kinds of volunteer roles we'll have available. Choosing one (or more) doesn't commit you to anything at this stage.Desk research (e.g. looking up information on websites)Contacting local authorities or household waste and recycling centres (by email or phone)Visting household waste and recycling centres in personData analysisI'm not sure, but I'd like to be kept up to date anywayEmail(Required)Do you consent to recieving emails from us about this work?We will only email you with opportunities to take part in our research into reuse at household waste and recycling facilities in the UK, unless you also opt-into our newsletter. Read our Privacy Policy.Yes, send me email invitations to learn more and take part in this workAlso send me The Restart Project's email newsletterHiddenDate DD slash MM slash YYYY CommentsThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ

The post Does your recycling centre offer reuse options? Join our investigation appeared first on The Restart Project.

Following the news can make it feel like people are more divided than ever. But here’s one thing most of us agree on: reusing products and repairing them when they break reduces our impact on the planet, saves us money and can be incredibly rewarding. Repair is a valuable skill that can lead to employment, and volunteer-led repair events like ours help build reslient local communities. It’s no surprise then that four out of five people in the UK want the government to do more to support repair.

But our politicians don’t seem to have noticed.

So we’re bringing repair and reuse to them! On the 7th of May 2024, we’re running a repair event inside the Houses of Parliament to show them first hand why repair and reuse matter and how the right policies can make it more accessible for all of us.

Over the course of the two-hour drop-in event, we’ll invite MPs to learn about:

how repair can help solve the problem of e-waste and reduce the upstream impacts of making new products
the limitations to the UK’s current and exclusive focus on recycling
the thriving landscape of Repair Cafés and other community repair groups in the UK
the UK Repair & Reuse Declaration and the five key policies we’re calling for

We’ve teamed up with our partners in the Community Repair Network to make sure that communities across the UK are represented and with refurbished tech seller Back Market to bring in the voice of business too.

We have invited all MPs to drop by. But if you’re based in the UK, we need your help to make sure you local MP comes along. As a constituent, you have real influence when it comes to your MP’s choices.

Please consider asking your MP to attend, using our simple tool below:

The post We’re bringing repair & reuse to Parliament appeared first on The Restart Project.

This post is by Fiona Dear, originally posted on the Green Alliance blog.

The UK is currently the world’s second top producer of electrical waste per person. 1

That fact tends to surprise people, but more surprising is that, until recently, very little was being done about it. For those interested in tackling the UK’s e-waste it’s been a bit like waiting for the proverbial bus: we wait years for any substantial policy opportunities, and then two come along at once.

First, for the past few months we’ve been working with Peers for the Planet, Green Alliance and the Design Council to support a right to repair amendment to the Digital Markets Bill, tabled by Baroness Hayman. Consumer rights aspects of Right to Repair legislation ensure that we can all get the support we need from producers to keep our electrical products going for longer. It was unfortunately withdrawn at the report stage last week, but the work already done unearthed strong cross party support for right to repair in principle and it has given us something to build on.

The opportunity more people will have heard of is the recent consultation on reforming what happens to waste electrical and electronic equipment (known as WEEE). The last time the WEEE system was reformed was a decade ago and we’ve been waiting three years for this one, so it was a big deal.

Government’s focus remains firmly on recyclingThe proposals the consultation focused on were around getting more waste electricals out of people’s drawers, cupboards and household bins, and into the recycling stream. Headline measures that will make it easier to put our waste electricals in the right place include kerbside collections of e-waste and mandatory producer and retailer – including online – take back schemes.

The chances are, you’ll have heard of the retailer take back proposal under the misleading moniker: the ‘toaster tax’. The British Retail Consortium has been in uproar about retailers of a certain size having to take back any electrical product, whether they’ve just sold a new one or not. The argument is that this cost will be passed onto consumers and will equate to a £1 billion tax. The problem with this argument is who should pay for it then? The point of extended producer responsibility regulations is that the environmental costs of the stuff we use are captured in the market price. If those costs are not shouldered by those producing or making money from selling the product or by those buying it, who should pay for it instead? The taxpayer, or maybe Defra, the government agency responsible for our environment? It obviously doesn’t make sense to downplay the environmental cost of electricals that we are replacing ever more frequently, as the consequences of our throwaway economy will have to be picked up by someone eventually and, if not us, it will be future generations or other countries.

Restart agrees it should be easier for people to pass on their electrical products in a way that makes the best use of the resources inside them, and that producers and retailers should absorb that cost. Does that mean we love these new proposals? Not exactly. We argue they should go further.

This is a once in a decade opportunityIt’s well established that prioritising repair, reduction and reuse wastes fewer resources and reduces carbon emissions. So, rather than tinkering with a waste system that revolves around recycling, we should use this moment to embrace a truly circular economy, centred on repair and reuse, and the reduction of the amount of e-waste we produce in the first place.

It won’t be easy. It requires an overhaul of how things are done. But, 30 years ago, we didn’t know how to recycle at scale. The recycling regulations we have aren’t perfect — we’re still not meeting our recycling targets for instance – but they have created the conditions for a huge recycling industry to spring up.

If Defra could create the right conditions, we could be looking back in 30 years and seeing now as the moment when reuse and repair were revived.

The call for evidence that accompanied the WEEE consultation started to do this. We were encouraged to see some policies we’re calling for in our repair and reuse declaration being explored. Such as reuse targets that would reward waste processors for reusing or reselling products more than for recycling them. We found out last year that almost half of the small waste electricals sent for recycling at household waste and recycling centres could be easily reused, so regulations to encourage reuse are sorely needed. Or ecolabelling of products, like the French repair index, which has been shown to help consumers choose more repairable products, and which has had a knock on effect on manufacturers’ support for repair. Or a ban on the destruction of unsold goods. I don’t really need to say anything more about that.

These are all important policies, but what we need is a joined up, overarching strategy that aims to keep things in use longer, reduce what we’re throwing away and reduce the reliance on buying new.

Efforts to make it easier to expand the collection of e-waste from people and businesses is a perfect opportunity to retain value in products, especially as it will help to minimise damage in transit. But this will only be the case if reuse is made central to system design.

Philip Dunne of the Environmental Audit Committee recently called out the government for its inaction to tackle our “e-waste tsunami”. Will the WEEE call for evidence lead to a more strategic approach? We shall see, but let’s hope we don’t have to wait another three years to find out.

(Feature image by Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

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Source: The Global E-waste Monitor 2024

The post The UK’s shocking e-waste problem can be fixed with more reuse and repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

Last year, we teamed up with some of our partners in the Community Repair Network to support the establishment of repair initiatives in universities across the UK. Inspired by the vitality and tenacity of student environmental campaigns, we wanted to focus our attention on introducing more young people — who are typically under-represented in our network — to community repair. Our aim for this project is to meet young people in an environment that they already inhabit and curate a project that was specifically tailored to introducing and engaging them with repair. We hope this project will spark a lot of curiosity and excitement towards repair and lead more young people and students to be a bigger component of the community repair ecosystem.

Opportunities from Working in Universities.Working with and in universities, has offered a unique opportunity for us to engage with students and staff members in an environment centered around learning, building new skills and designing better ways for us to exist in the world. We’ve had the chance to talk to lecturers about incorporating repair material into their syllabus, engage with product design students about the importance of repairability and work with researchers delving into the circular economy. Repair is an essential life skill to learn – and so it makes sense that it should go hand-in-hand with our educational institutions.

Student Repair Revolution: The Project so Far.The Student Repair Revolution project is funded by Hubbub and Virgin Media O2’s Time After Time E-waste Fund. Hubbub has also released this interesting report on Gen Z’s electronic purchasing habits and attitudes towards repair, if you want to learn more!

Over the last nine months, we’ve engaged with students and staff members in over twenty UK universities who are passionate about repair, skillsharing and sustainability. It has allowed us an opportunity to support different types of repair event formats, and see what can work in this new environment.

We have taken inspiration from some of the fantastic pre-existing repair initiatives at the University of the Arts London, University of Leeds and Bangor University. Observing how they operate in slightly different ways with their own unique resources, sustainability governance and funding we decided it would be beneficial to adopt a flexible approach and see it as an opportunity to support each group on a case-by-case basis catering to each group’s own ideas and environment.

In recent months, it has been fantastic to see repair events held at the University of the Arts London, Bangor University, University of the West of England, University of Strathclyde and as part of Transition University of St. Andrews. We are also working with several other universities in setting up talks on e-waste and repair, workshops, repair cafes and other university repair initiatives in the upcoming months – so keep an eye out for more university repair updates!

Networking & Peer-SupportIn February, we hosted a webinar for organisers on creating a repair initiative that worked for them, and exploring ways to plan repair initiatives based on venue, audience and atmosphere which led to some really interesting discussions and fruitful exchanges of experience and ideas. We’re hoping to host some more informal meetings in the future for groups to share thoughts, lessons learned and difficulties about working within university institutions.

We have also set up a space on our community platform, Restarters for groups to discuss the project and their experiences organising in a university environment.

The Future of Repair at Universities.As our project draws to a close in the next few months, we’re hoping that it will have helped bring greater awareness to students about the growing issue of e-waste. Something that is particularly timely, as the UK is the second highest producer of e-waste per capita in the world. We hope students will feel empowered to take more ownership of their devices, and that they will be armed with the skills, confidence and knowledge to repair their electronics.

We also hope it will introduce a new perspective to the wider community repair ecosystem, and bring more young people into the world of repair and reuse. Working with universities is really exciting – and we’re thrilled there has been so much interest and demand for repair initiatives in universities. However it also has its own difficulties – with university bureaucracy and insurance being a particularly stubborn nut to crack and a high turnover rate with student bodies changing every few years.

Regardless, it’s an exciting new area – and we really encourage anyone wanting to set up an initiative in a university to start wherever they can! We have some tools to help navigate that process including this Student Information Pack and please reach out to the project coordinator, Pascale at pascale@therestartproject.org if you have any questions or ideas to share!

The post Starting a Student Repair Revolution appeared first on The Restart Project.

Recently, our co-founder Ugo gave a TEDx Talk on our journey through repair, and the importance of repair communities in raising awareness, championing repair, documenting repair barriers, and pushing for system change.

At a time when manufacturers are starting to wake up to the inevitability of a right to repair, we’re proud to be making progress on a set of issues that was completely ignored by the policy agenda just a decade ago. Yet, we’re aware that the throwaway economy is still strong, greenwashing is thriving, and recycling is still celebrated as the main pillar of the “circular economy” – while repair and reuse are barely taken into account. We need to profoundly rethink the way products are manufactured, consumed and reused if we are to truly slow down the global use of resources and embrace a just transition.

Policy improvements are urgently needed, and they’re not coming fast enough, in the UK, Europe or elsewhere. We will continue to raise awareness and demand a real and universal right to repair, and to put an end to planned obsolescence. But none of this would be happening without the efforts of tens of thousands of repair volunteers around the globe, bringing back hope and sharing skills through community groups. Restart Parties, Repair Cafes, Fixit Clinics, and all other types of groups promoting repair are at the heart of making this movement stronger and more effective. Will you join us?

The post TEDx talk: from community repair to a universal Right to Repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

The last few years have been really exciting for the Right to Repair in many countries outside the UK. Around the world we’ve seen people get access to more repairable and longer lasting products, cheaper repair options and better information about product repairability. As a result, repair is helping tackle climate change, reduce waste, lower living costs, support communities and create green skilled jobs in more places than ever.

Now in the UK, we have the opportunity to put repair back on the agenda too!

We recently co-hosted a webinar all about how we can put Right to Repair on the agenda in the UK in 2024. Watch the recording here, or keep reading for a summary of what we covered.Right to Repair is becoming a realityAcross Europe and North America, a number of countries have introduced measures to make repair more accessible. Here are just a few examples…

AustriaIn Austria, the government offers a bonus that covers up to 50% of the cost of repairs for household electrical and electronic products. Any Austrian resident can have their broken phone, coffee machine, TV (and so on) fixed at any participating repair shop and get half the cost reimbursed, up to €200.

Taking part in the repair bonus programme supports the domestic repair industry, and is good for the environment and your wallet.

– Austrian Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) [source]

The scheme has proved so popular that the government increased the total funding available. Nearly a million vouchers have been issued so far, saving people more than €70 million in repair costs. Repair businesses have also benefitted, with some even seeing their sales double. And of course, each extra repair helps reduce waste and slow demand for new, carbon-intensive products.

FranceSimilar repair vouchers were also introduced in France last year as part of an anti-waste and circular economy law from 2020. But this law went even further, prohibiting certain anti-repair practices, requiring spare parts for a range of products be made available for longer and—perhaps most notably—creating a repair index.

The landmark repair index gives a wide range of products a score based on how easy they are to fix and is displayed at the point of sale, encouraging people to consider repairability when choosing what to buy. Early evidence suggests that the index has shifted consumer behaviour; people tend to choose more repairable products, which has led to manufacturers offering more repair. There are now plans in Belgium and the EU as a whole for similar repair indexes.

USARight to Repair measures are also becoming reality in the USA. A handful of states have already passed laws that generally require manufacturers to allow owners and independent repair professionals access to the same repair information, parts, and tools made available to the manufacturers’ own dealers and authorized repair facilities. Many others are currently considering similar measures.

Each state has a slightly different approach. But momentum is building and more and more people are getting better access to a wider range of repair options across the country.

Can the UK catch up?Back in the UK, there’s been little progress.

We don’t have nothing; in 2021, the government introduced some pre-Brexit EU repair regulation. However these rules are limited and repair simply hasn’t been a priority since. Until now..?

The UK government recently proposed some changes to how waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) is regulated. As part of the process, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) have opened up a consultation and a call for evidence to help shape and refine the proposal. While most of the proposed changes in the consultation focus on boosting recycling—an often inefficient solution—the call for evidence is a rare chance to make the case for reducing waste through repair and reuse directly to policymakers themselves. Keep reading to learn how you can take part!

We are also working with a member of the House of Lords on a Right to Repair amendment to the Digital Markets Bill. We’ll soon learn whether that leads anywhere, but just having an amendment reach parliament is a huge step in the right direction.

Three things you can do1. Support the UK Repair and Reuse DeclarationLast October, we launched the UK Repair and Reuse Declaration – a call for UK policymakers to unlock the huge potential of repair and reuse. Over 250 repair cafes, businesses and other institutions have signed up, as well as MPs from parties across the spectrum.

We’re aiming to get 100 MPs to sign up before the summer. So if yours hasn’t signed yet, please ask your MP to sign using our super simple tool. It only takes a minute!

If you run a repair group, MPs love what you do! So, please use this template letter to tell them about your group, and invite them along to your next event (while asking them to sign the declaration).

A group of community members having signed the Repair & Reuse Declaration. Photo by The Restart Project2. Tell the government why repair and reuse matters to you [WEEE Reform]Make the most of this rare chance to make your voice heard: submit evidence to the government’s e-waste consultation yourself or on behalf of your community group, organisation or business.

To make it easier, we’ve identified the relevant questions and written template answers for you to adapt in your own submission. The deadline is the 7th of March 2024.

Find instructions and our template answers you can adapt here.

Plan for International Repair Day 2024Repair Day is back! This year it falls on the 19th of October, but it’s never too early to start planning. How will you celebrate the day? Can you invite your MP or get local media coverage? We’re working on some exciting plans too, which will share soon.

In the meantime, stay in the loop by signing up for our newsletter below.

Stay up to date * Follow the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter, full of updates and events. You can unsubscribe at any time. Read our privacy policy. * Email * Right to Repair + Also send me updates about Right to Repair in the UK * EmailThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ

Featured image: Mark A Phillips

The post How we can push for Right to Repair in the UK in 2024 appeared first on The Restart Project.

Heard murmurings about the recent EU legislation but don’t know what it means? Don’t worry, we’re here to debrief about some pretty big steps forward for EU consumer rights of repairability – progress which the European Right to Repair Campaign has worked on tirelessly over the last year.

It’s a huge piece of legislation because for the first time, it goes beyond just mandating design requirements for products (the “ecodesign” regulations which for example will make future smartphones more repairable from 2025 – at least in the EU, no word yet on the UK government’s adopting these!) and instead focuses on obligations for manufacturers and sellers to try to ensure that consumers actually can get their products repaired.

There was a lot of media hype surrounding the agreement among EU institutions, with claims that this secures a full right to repair…we disagree and here’s why:

Now, we’re happy that this legislation starts tackling some of the barriers to repair that we’ve been documenting for many years. For example, by asking that repair prices are “reasonable”, it helps to not deter people from repairing. But we’ll have to see how this plays out in practice, as reasonable is not easy to quantify. A second massive barrier is the use of parts-pairing to limit the use of second-hand or compatible spare parts. The directive should tackle this aspect, but we know the devil is in the details and we suspect manufacturers will try to find loopholes.

A major sticking point for us is that most of the legislation only covers the same product categories for which design requirements already exist. It fails to address the current shortcomings of many manufacturers, neither providing parts nor repair services for products like small kitchen appliances (kettles, toasters, coffee makers…), audio products (like headphones) and many more of the items frequently seen at repair events.

It’s not all bad though! Interestingly, the legislation extends the total legal guarantee of a repaired product by 12 months, therefore incentivising consumers to choose repairs – rather than replacements during the legal guarantee period. This will not however prevent manufacturers and retailers from offering an instant replacement product instead, which might be more appealing for those who are pressed for time. So it’s hard to estimate the actual impact this will have in slowing down our growing e-waste mountain.

Why else is this legislation important to Restart’s mission? We seem to be trendsetters in mapping repair, with the EU moving towards mandatory mapping of all* repair options – something that we’ve been prototyping at Restart on a smaller scale and advocating for via London Repairs for years * We hope that there will be a huge impact from EU member states being required to promote repair. They’ll have to adopt one of four strategies including, instituting repair funds/vouchers; VAT reduction for repair; information campaigns promoting repair; and funding to support community repair initiatives. How these options are implemented may vary massively from country to country, but there’s major potential here!

What about the UK? The Right to Repair Directive doesn’t change anything in the UK, other than further highlighting the UK’s delay to address regulations on repairability. This is why we are working hard on growing the list of organisations, politicians and businesses that support our Repair and Reuse Declaration.

We are currently working with Peers for the Planet to add right to repair into a consumer rights bill in the UK, and making sure that the voice of the repair movement is heard in the current WEEE (waste electricals) reform consultation.

So what’s next?The unrelenting efforts of the Right to Repair Campaign have shown that progress is possible! But it won’t happen without an alliance of community repair activists, repair organisations, businesses promoting repairs and environmental organisations. No one in the media remembered to share that the original proposal from the European Commission was virtually empty, and that the repair friendly position by the Parliament – endorsing many of our campaign’s demands – was weakened by member states, evidently successfully lobbied by manufacturers.

We’ll keep putting pressure on these issues with partners in the UK and in the EU, working towards a real and universal right to repair!

We’ve attached the press release from the European Right to Repair campaign below. Keep an eye on the campaign’s website for a full assessment of the agreed text in the near future.

New EU law sets to make repair more affordable for selected products, campaigners push for widespread right to repair[Images courtesy of Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

The post What’s the latest on Right to Repair in the EU? And what it means for the UK appeared first on The Restart Project.

2023 was huge for The Restart Project and for repair in general. As the year draws to a close and with so much to celebrate, let’s look back at our top ten moments…

10 – Mapping repair groups across the UKIt’s hard to believe, but the UK has never had a single map or list of all community repair groups across the country. Until this year! We teamed up with our partners in the Community Repair Network and Repair Café International to create the UK’s most comprehensive map of Repair Cafés, Restarters groups and other community repair projects – even we were surprised to learn that there are over 500 repair groups around the country!

9 – Pushing for a universal Right to RepairTogether with our partners in the European Right to Repair campaign, we focused on the affordability of repair, an issue rarely tackled by legislation. Specifically, we’ve been pushing for a universal Right to Repair in an upcoming piece of EU legislation called the Right to Repair Directive, which aims to tackle the consumer rights aspect of repair.

This is not about the way products are designed. Instead, it’s about how manufacturers facilitate or impede the repair of products, including by setting prohibitive prices for spare parts. We came up with a very creative stunt—“The Price is Right”—in front of the EU Parliament that shocked MEPs with the high price of parts. We also published a fun video highlighting the perverse incentives to replace products, rather than repairing them.

Can’t see the video above? Watch it on YouTube here.

8 – Publishing over 70,000 more records of repair dataAs the main driving force behind the Open Repair Alliance, we collect, collate, clean and publish data about repairs attempted at community events around the world. This data, originally recorded by the Alliance’s growing number of data partners, is used by researchers, campaigners and companies to learn more about why products break and how they could be made easier to fix.

This year we broke all previous records by releasing data on a whopping 70,000 additional repair attempts, bringing the overall total to over 130,000 records.

7 – Winning an award for our work with repair dataPublishing all that repair data is only one aspect of our work with data. Over the years, we’ve enlisted the help of our amazing community to analyse data and gain new insights into the environmental benefits of repair and the most common reasons certain products break. In turn, these findings have helped us push for Right to Repair policies, including more repairable smartphones and tablets (more on that below)!

So this year we were thrilled to win the prestigious European Union Prize for Citizen Science—Digital Communities Award! A huge thank you and congratulations to all of you in our community!

6 – Starting the Student Repair RevolutionEngaging young people is a perennial challenge for the community repair movement. So this year, we teamed up with partners from the Community Repair Network to launch the Student Repair Revolution! Together, we’re working with university groups up and down the country, supporting and encouraging them to try whatever repair events work for them in their university and wider community.

5 – Uncovering the waste behind recyclingIn March, we spent a week testing all electrical products brought for recycling at a London reuse and recycling centre. We wanted to see whether they reusable. Shockingly, we found that almost half of the devices destined for recycling could be reused. All told, our study highlighted a huge opportunity to potentially divert over 30,000 products from the waste stream in the UK per week.

4 – Co-organising the biggest ever gathering for UK community repairIn September, we partnered with Repair Cafe Wales to run Fixfest UK 2023. Over 120 representatives from community repair groups, universities, repair businesses, public bodies, waste agencies and more across the UK gathered in Cardiff for a memorable day of conversations, stories and inspiration. Together, we discussed how to make repair the norm in the UK and the roles we play within our own communities.

Signing the Reuse & Repair Declaration at Fixfest UK 2023. Photo: Mark A Phillips#3 – Launching the UK Repair & Reuse DeclarationAfter months of consultation with partners, members of the Community Repair Network and allied companies, we launched the UK Repair & Reuse Declaration. The Declaration calls on UK lawmakers to introduce five (overwhelmingly popular) policies that can help repair and reuse flourish across the country.

Since launching on International Repair Day in October, over 240 repair cafés, NGOs, businesses and MPs have signed up! Learn more and add your voice here.

2 – Celebrating the largest International Repair Day yetAnd speaking of International Repair Day, this year’s was the biggest ever! Our theme was ‘Repair for Everyone’ and we were delighted to see it playing out in practice with over 1,500 official events listed from the arctic circle to Aotearoa New Zealand’s southern island and hundreds of places in between.

We’re already thinking about how to make the next Repair Day even bigger. So save the date: the 19th of October 2024!

For inspiration, learn more about what happened on Repair Day 2023.

Communities around the world celebrated Repair Day#1 – Securing more repairable smartphones and tabletsIn a huge win for the Right to Repair, the EU passed new rules for smartphones and tablets, making them last longer and be easier to repair!

For new models released from June 2025, both independent repairs and end-users in the EU (and possibly beyond) will have access to repair information and (some) spare parts for at least 7 years after a product is taken off the market. In many cases, batteries will need to be user-replaceable. Manufacturers will also need to offer software and security updates for at least 5 years. The new rules will additionally introduce an EU-wide repair index for smartphones.

The European Right to Repair campaign, which we co-founded, had been pushing hard for these rules. And while we didn’t get everything we wanted, they are an important step towards a more repairable future. We can’t wait to build on this success!

Thank you!Restart has always been people-powered and we couldn’t have done any of this without the support from our community, partners and allies. So, thank you to all of you who have helped us achieve so much this year. We can’t wait to keep building on what we’ve accomplished together in 2024!

___

Featured photo: Mark A Phillips

The post Our top ten moments from 2023 appeared first on The Restart Project.

For Repair Day 2023, we wanted Repair for Everyone and that meant organising a celebration that was bigger than it’s ever been before. The global repair community really pulled it out of the bag, with over 1600 events registered on the Open Repair Alliance map and many more happening across the month.

Here in the UK, we launched the Repair and Reuse Declaration in a bid to make our slogan real. We’re asking our government to support repair and reuse culture to thrive by enshrining the Right to Repair in law, and directing funding and resources into cultivating a healthy and flourishing circular ecosystem in the UK. Repair groups across the UK invited their local politicians to see what they do in person and learn about the value of community repair.

Want to learn more about what we’re asking for? You can visit repairreusedeclaration.uk to read our asks and email your local MP to ask them to support the cause.

Repairing around the worldIn Europe, the Right to Repair campaign was also making itself heard. In a bid to amplify the need for affordable spare parts, they held an event in Brussels, bringing together members of the EU parliament, climate NGOs and youth representatives to participate in a game of “The Price is Right – Repair Edition”.

“The price is right” stunt in Brussels (Image by Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)In other parts of Europe, groups in countries including Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark held hundreds of repair cafés and community outreach events. In the Netherlands, a new children’s show featuring repair was premiered in cinemas across the country – with accompanying repair events.

Further afield, there were Repair Day events happening all across the Northern US and a couple in Argentina and Mexico too! Our friends at Club de Reparadores held their first event in Querétaro in collaboration with Revuelta Club.

Repairers in Buenos Aires (Image by Club de Reparadores)There were lots of youth outreach and educational events by our friends in Africa. In Benin, Les 100tinel Fix Club held an event for school children to repair their teaching supplies. And in Uganda, Community Creativity for Development ran training courses for women at the Ocean village Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement – putting into practice the idea that repair really is for everyone! From India to Korea to New Zealand, communities in every continent took part, highlighting that our movement truly is global.

We could see the reach of Repair Day 2023 through the presence of all of you online too! Our social media cards popped up in over eight different languages which is always amazing to see.

And don’t worry if you missed out on the fun, we’re already putting our heads together to make Repair Day 2024 bigger still! Stay tuned for more over the coming months.

The post What happened on Repair Day 2023? appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’re delighted to launch our new Repair and Reuse Declaration to celebrate Repair Day, with a whopping 125 (and counting) groups signed up. The Declaration is supported by more than 100 community repair groups alongside NGOs and businesses like The Design Council, Keep Britain Tidy, Back Market and SUEZ recycling and recovery UK.

Check out and sign the declaration

Why a new declaration, and why now? Throwaway products are fuelling climate change, growing our toxic waste mountain, and they’re ripping off the British public: people are stuck in a cycle of throwing away and buying costly new electronics. Right now, the UK is the second highest producer of electronic waste in the world per capita, but there is little happening to fix this in central government.

We know that repair is popular. We know most people don’t like throwing away things that they see as having value. So there’d be little risk of public backlash if politicians were to make repair easier. Meanwhile local authorities, waste companies and even many manufacturers and retailers agree that reuse and repair are preferable to recycling.

A YouGov poll we commissioned for Repair Day found that only 28% of Brits were able to successfully fix, or have fixed, their last electrical item that broke. 47% of those polled didn’t try to, or were unable to repair their last broken electrical item, and the top reasons for that were that repair was too expensive (38%), and that it was quicker to replace it (33%).

So why is there no political effort to make repair and reuse easier and cheaper in the UK? Because it’s complicated. There’s no silver bullet solution to making reuse and repair more common and accessible. And tackling this challenge is at the bottom of a long list of priorities for the government departments responsible. Most politicians aren’t hearing that there’s public demand for a better repair and reuse system.

So our challenge is to raise the profile of repair and reuse, and get them on the political agenda. We had the Manchester Declaration, launched in 2018, and there were still groups and MPs signing up to it. But we needed to make this support more visible to politicians, and whilst we were at it, we decided to have a refresh, and include some of the policies that could really make a difference.

So.. drumroll… the Repair and Reuse Declaration was born, co-created by many of those active in the sector: from community repair groups with lived experience of the barriers to fixing; to national policy experts familiar with the opportunities and barriers to creating change.

The new declaration will help to show the breadth of support for keeping our products in use for longer. Please help us raise the profile of these issues and build political support for tackling them at RepairReuseDeclaration.UK.

What are we asking for? The declaration calls for politicians to support repair and reuse by implementing 5 key policies. A YouGov poll commissioned for the declaration launch showed strong support for all of these measures – polling results are indicated in brackets below (see note 1 for survey details).

We ask UK government to: * Make repair more affordable, through tax reductions (80% support) and repair vouchers (79% support). * Expand the UK’s right to repair regulations to cover all consumer products, strengthen design standards and remove barriers to repair for everyone (85% support). * Introduce a repair index to help the public choose more repairable and durable products (80% support). * Introduce requirements and targets for reuse and repair to be prioritised over recycling and providing investment to make this a reality. This should be a key part of amended extended producer responsibility rules (83% support). * Support a new generation of repairers through repair training, accreditation and apprenticeships (85% support).

For more information on why these policies are important, and examples of what people are doing in other countries see here.

We hope you can join in and get your MP on board. Here’s to a future where business models and behaviours like reuse, repair, rental and borrowing are always prioritised, and throwaway products are a thing of the past.

Sign the declaration

Note 1: The poll was commissioned by The Restart Project. All figures are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,051 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 12th – 13th October 2023. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

(Image by Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The post Announcing the Repair and Reuse Declaration appeared first on The Restart Project.

Why it’s important and what others are doingRepair and reuse are affordable and easy ways to end frustration with in-built obsolescence. They’re central to achieving a truly circular, less wasteful, and resilient economy, help to tackle climate change and achieve our net zero ambition. And they can reduce living costs for UK households and create skilled green jobs.

With the Repair and Reuse Declaration, we’re asking UK legislators and decision-makers at all levels to support repair and reuse to thrive, including:

1. Make repair more affordable, through tax reductions and repair vouchers Repair vouchers: Austria set up a national repair voucher scheme in 2022, which effectively subsidised the cost of professional repairs by allowing families to obtain a rebate of 50% of the price of a repair, up to €200 per year. A previous Upper Austrian trial, found that 40% of the beneficiaries wouldn’t have chosen repair without the voucher scheme.

France has since initiated an innovative repair voucher scheme in 2023, funded by Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) income. This route to financing the scheme could be applicable to the UK, as it effectively uses part of the existing contributions from manufacturers to extend the lifetime of products and prevent products from prematurely entering the e-waste stream.

Cutting VAT on repairs: A recent study by Green Alliance showed 54% of people surveyed in the UK support green VAT measures like this. Only 12% oppose. And it could contribute to creating 34,000 jobs in the repair economy.

A number of businesses, from spare parts providers (Replace Base) to manufacturers are currently calling for the UK government to remove VAT on spare parts and repair services to reduce the cost of repair. Sign the Replace Base petition here.

More information: You can hear more about other financial incentives for repair from the European Right to Repair.

2. Make repair easier: Expand the UK’s right to repair regulations to cover all consumer products, strengthen design standards and remove barriers to repair for everyone. The UK has existing ecodesign legislation, some of which covers resource efficiency and repair for a limited set of products including white goods and TVs. They mandate that manufacturers must make service manuals and some spare parts for these products available to professional repairers for 7 to 10 years after retiring a product from the market. Now it’s time to expand this “right to repair” legislation so that it’s fit for purpose in our rapidly changing consumer goods economy. This means:

Expand and strengthen Ecodesign regulation to cover *all electronic and consumer products, ensuring that all new consumer electricals must be designed for easy reparability before they can be introduced to the market.*
Ensure that all people have access to service manuals, so consumers, community repair groups and independent repairers have the information they need to fix these products. And ensure all people can access spare parts for at least 10 years after a product is removed from the market.
*Ensure that software and security updates are provided for at least 5 years after a product comes off the market.***For phones, laptops and, increasingly other products like smart fridges that are connected to the internet, ongoing security updates are needed to protect households from hacking risks. Ongoing software support is needed to keep the products functioning as they should.Too often, this software and security support ends within a few years, far before the useful lifetime of the product ends. This means too many products become obsolete too early, which increases electronic waste – or puts consumers at risk. There are currently no UK requirements for minimum support periods.After a recent successful campaign in the USA led by the brilliant PIRG, Google extended its support for Chromebooks, widely used in schools, to 10 years, for all models released since 2021. Doubling the life of Chromebooks could cut carbon pollution equivalent to taking 900,000 cars off the road for a year and result in $1.8 billion in savings for schools in the US.The EU has recently expanded its ecodesign regulations to cover smartphones and tablets, mandating that from June 2025 manufacturers will have to make software and security updates available for new models for at least 5 years after removing a product from the market, as well as making spare parts and repair information available for at least 7 years.

3. Introduce a repair index to help the public choose more repairable and durable productsUK consumers aren’t able to easily find out how repairable products are when purchasing new items. This means they buy products that they have to replace sooner than they’d like, and there’s little incentive for manufacturers to make products repairable.

A repair index has been in place in France since 2021. This is similar to the existing eco rating we have for energy use on appliances now, but based on how easy it is to repair each product. For this, manufacturers self-assess the repairability of their products based on agreed criteria. This is then displayed as a single score from 0-10, displayed prominently alongside the price.

Analysis of the french repair index after the first year showed that:

55% of people were aware of the index
76% of those aware, said it was useful for their purchase
Consumers tended to prefer products with a higher repairability score.
This consumer shift, alongside upcoming EU legislation has resulted in companies improving the repairability of their products

We need a repair index in the UK so that consumers can make informed choices about the products they buy.

4. Save reusable products from being wasted: Introduce requirements and targets for reuse and repair to be prioritised over recycling, and provide investment to make this a reality. This should be a key part of amended Extended Producer Responsibility rules. In our recent study of small appliances taken to a Household Reuse and Recycling Centre, we found that almost half of the electrical products sent for recycling during the study could have remained in use if reuse and repair processes had been in place:

36% of all small electricals headed for recycling were still working.
An additional 10% of items assessed only needed simple, low cost repairs.
It was estimated that across the UK this could mean that over 30,000 usable electrical products, with a potential resale value of up to £5,000 are being recycled every week.

Although recycling targets and the current Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requirements include reuse, they inadvertently dissuade manufacturers and local authorities from investing in redistributing reusable items. With a far more established value chain, the emphasis has been on the challenge of meeting recycling targets.

The solution: An overhaul of the current EPR rules is needed to drive the establishment of local and national infrastructure to keep products in use for longer, saving people money and using our resources more efficiently. This should include separate reuse targets, prioritised over recycling and additional targets for overall waste reduction. EPR could also be better used to drive improvements in product design and could help fund initiatives to support reuse and repair such as repair vouchers (mentioned above).

5. Support a new generation of repairers through repair training, accreditation and apprenticeships. The Chartered Institution for Wastes Management estimates that for the transition to a circular economy, 20,000 repair and reuse jobs will be needed by 2030, with 80,000+ needed by 2040. Green Alliance estimates that an effective and expanded circular economy could help create over 450,000 jobs by 2035. Upstream, there is significant demand for designers who can create repairable products.

Repair cafes are frequently oversubscribed, with public demand for repair far outstripping fixing capacity at the volunteer-run events. Yet as public demand for repair and preloved products, and as the need for competent and safe repair of our appliances increases, we are losing skilled repairers. Even where jobs are guaranteed by manufacturers offering repair services, recruitment of new repairers is challenging.

This is having a knock on effect: Courses for repair technicians are dwindling due to reduced demand and there are currently no accreditation options available for electrical repair training. So there are few options, and fewer incentives, for those that want to learn repair skills.

The solution: Alongside the measures needed to build demand and infrastructure for a strong repair and reuse economy outlined above, we need investment in repair skills to drive the economy. This means introducing an accreditation scheme for repair professionals, funding specific skills interventions like Skills Bootcamps on repair and green design, building repair apprenticeship options and including repair into existing engineering and design apprenticeships.

All of the policies above enjoy overwhelming public support. A YouGov poll commissioned for the declaration launch showed that between 79% and 85% of the general public strongly support or tend to support every measure (see note 1 for survey details).

The move to our throwaway economy has been a slow creep, and the measures needed to give reuse and repair a boost are numerous and complex. There are many more options for stimulating repair and reuse, but these policies are a start in the shift towards a truly circular economy.

__

Please find here a more detailed policy briefing to share with your MP.

Note 1: The poll was commissioned by The Restart Project. All figures are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,051 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 12th – 13th October 2023. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

(Photo by Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The post What we’re calling for in the Repair and Reuse Declaration appeared first on The Restart Project.

Repair Day is on October 21st and we want Repair for Everyone. While we, as a collective, have made a huge difference to the public perception and resurgence of repair, it’s still not accessible to everyone. Why? Well, With manufacturers preventing repair of their products for profit and a lack of incentive by the government to support repair, fixing is often either too difficult, costly or time-consuming for people. By repairing and reusing your things, you can save money and the environment. We’re calling for a real Right to Repair, so that repairing your stuff can be an option for everyone.

Do you have an event planned to mark the day? Add it to our map using this form so that we can see what the repair community is doing across the globe!

You can access the toolkit for promoting the event here, including materials in multiple languages.

There are currently more than 1000 events listed on the ORA Repair Day map – and that’s not all of them! The European Right to Repair campaign is strong as ever, and this Repair Day fixers all over Europe are going to be writing to their politicians, recording video messages at community events and joining a special action outside the EU Parliament in Brussels. In the UK, repairers are recognising that the system is broken, and will be calling on government to introduce policies to make repair and reuse the norm.

Over 70 repair events are already registered in the UK, hundreds of repair events will be taking place in France, and Repair Café Denmark will be awarding the Danish Repairability Prize on the day. There are events listed in Norway, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and we expect to see more pop up in the coming weeks!

In the Netherlands, they’re especially encouraging children to get involved in repair with the premiere of a new kids drama about repair. Over 30 cinemas will be screening the show and holding repair cafes so that children can get an intro to fixing in real time.

In Germany, Round Table Repair Germany and INKOTA together with their partners e.g. Netzwerk Reparatur-Initiativen, will present their petition for a nationwide repair bonus to the Federal Ministry of Environment, so far the petition has over 65,000 signatories. And FixFirst are holding a human vs. AI fixing battle in Berlin.

In Belgium, Repair & Share and Repair Together are highlighting repair in schools, organisations, youth movements, village squares, the heart of cities, libraries, and more. In Wallonia, a repairathon will be held to attempt to fix as many items as possible on the day.

Les 100tinel Fix Club in Porto-Novo, Benin will be holding events in schools to try and fix their resources. And in Uganda, Community Creativity for Development will be running a two day training course for a group of 15 women, who will showcase what they’ve learned at an event for Repair Day. You can help fund this event here, if you are able to donate.

Our friends at Repair Cafe Hudson Valley are busy holding repair cafes up in the North-East of the US, and there are events scattered around the country. In Mexico, Estrategia Circular MX are hosting a circular economy webinar, and Revuelta Club are holding their first repair event in Querétaro, as part of the Club de Reparadores network.

And if you can’t reach any of these events in person, Cherwell Collective are running an online event to reach people in communities who don’t have access to a local repair group. You can engage with fixing online using the Global Fixers Discord server where repairers at international events will be answering your questions about fixing.

And there are plenty of ways that everyone can celebrate at home too. These include:

repair an item that you’ve had lying around for a while, if you need help you can find a local community repair event here;
share your experience and post a photo/video of your repair on social media using the hashtag #RepairDay #RepairforEveryone. This could be a positive experience of repair, or a frustrating one, anything that tells the story of why you want more support for repair for everyone;
encourage your family and friends to do the same;
pass on your knowledge by helping someone else with a repair;
or support a local repair business.

[Photos courtesy of Mark A Phillips, and Mathew Lubari]

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If you’ve been following any of our communications over the last 18 months (or those of our project partner Possible) you’ll know that we’ve been testing permanent repair in two Fixing Factories with support from the The National Lottery Community Fund. One of these, the Brent Fixing Factory has been based in a Reuse and […]

The post A Fixing Factory Farewell appeared first on The Restart Project.

What is Fixfest UK and why should you come? Fixfest UK 2023 is the biggest gathering of community repair projects in the UK – a chance to connect, share, celebrate and strengthen our fantastic movement. We’re meeting in Cardiff on 30 September 2023. Participants will share the ideas and energy from our community repair projects […]

The post Fixfest UK 2023: Let’s strengthen the UK repair movement appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're delighted to have been awarded the European Union Prize for Citizen Science—Digital Communities Award for our work with repair data and policy campaigning.

The post We won the European Union Prize for Citizen Science—Digital Communities Award! appeared first on The Restart Project.

It’s often said that repair skills are more common among older generations. Unless these skills are passed down, so the argument goes, we’re in danger of losing them entirely. Whether true or not, teaching the next generation about repair has never been more important. As the climate crisis deepens, repair can play a vital role […]

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How many times have you brought something to a recycling centre, and ended up spotting something else in a skip that looks reusable?

Since the early days of Restart, we’ve witnessed missed opportunities with reusable and repairable products. And this over time prompted us to do more – for example helping to coordinate donations of reusable laptops to groups refurbishing them during lockdown; or establishing a UK computer reuse directory to help people find options to give unwanted products a new lease of life.

Most recently our Brent Fixing Factory, based in a Abbey Road reuse and recycling centre is rescuing laptops. Here we refurbish as many as possible of the laptops brought to the centre for recycling, then donate them to people in need, whilst training young people in repair and refurbishing techniques.

Support our work today & double your impactUntil Thursday 27 April, all donations to Restart will be doubled by The Big Give! Please consider supporting our work to fix our relationship with electronics.

Donate →

But we wanted to look at the other small electrical products that were being brought for recycling. So with support from West London Waste Authority we designed a “waste composition analysis” which we ran for one week at the end of March, testing all electrical products brought for recycling to establish their reusability potential.

We were shocked at what we found. We tested 599 products that members of the public brought to be recycled, and found that 36.2% of them – or 217 – had the potential to be immediately reused, while an additional 57 (9.5%) required only minor repairs. That’s almost half of the electricals headed for recycling that could have had a second life in the hands of someone who needed them.

The wasted potential of this is significant: The products that were still working amount to more than 700 kg of waste generated in one week at just one site. Reusing these devices instead of recycling them would have the potential to save almost 6 tonnes of CO2e, if they displaced purchases of new products, according to our methodology.

And if all of these products were resold, they could have a potential resale value of up to £5,000, based on sales in Tech-Takeback’s Revaluit store for second hand electronics in Brighton

We estimate that if replicated across the UK it could mean that over 30,000 perfectly reusable small electrical and electronic products are “wasted” in recycling skips at household waste and recycling centres – every week.

This was just a research project, and as such we couldn’t reuse the tested products. The first-hand experience of the wasted potential is a clear reminder of the urgent change we need.

We hope this research will help make the case for more investment into projects to salvage reusable products and give them a second life. Findings also highlight the need for policy change across the UK, and we’ll make them known in consultations scheduled later this year. It is worth highlighting that once a product is inserted into a bay at a recycling centre, it is deemed as waste for recycling. Therefore it is crucial that products with reuse potential are filtered out before they get collected and processed by contractors that waste authorities work with.

What kind of products end up wasted? We found that all kinds of working products end up in recycling bins: from printers to kettles, irons to radios, vacuum cleaners to mobile phones.

These are products that families in need should be able to access at low, or no cost rather than feeding the mountain of e-waste that organisations like Restart are trying to tackle.

The fact that we are prematurely losing potentially reusable electricals to recycling is nothing new. According to a 2011 WRAP study, 23% of all electricals collected or brought to household waste and recycling centres were either fit for reuse, or required only minor repairs before they could be resold. This work keeps getting quoted 12 years on, so we decided to replicate the research on a smaller scale. Unfortunately, with 45% of products we tested being reusable with only minor repairs our results suggest that things have got worse since 2011. This remains a sort of “hidden secret”, and our study has shown that it continues to be untackled.

The push to recycleThe system is evidently broken. We are told that we’re not recycling enough, and it’s true: the UK missed its target for recycling of electrical and electronic waste in 2022, yet again. But while there are definitely lots of products that should be recycled, there are many that shouldn’t be anywhere near the recycling bin, they should be living a longer, or a second life in the hands and the homes of people that can use them.

Campaigns and messaging focus on reminding us to recycle. Where are the regulations and communications campaigns encouraging us to keep our electricals in use? They’re few and far between, and that’s because there’s no incentive for actors in the system to put the effort into diverting products for reuse.

What needs to changeIn parts of the UK, waste authorities and waste management companies are testing out ways to separate reusable items from waste. We visited one notable example in Manchester, the Renew Hub run by Suez. Such examples show that there’s a huge amount of potential in saving products for reuse.

At the moment these are voluntary initiatives. We call for filtering and diverting products for reuse to become mandatory. Every local authority, every waste authority, every waste management company operating in the UK should be required to prevent unnecessary waste, and to contribute to reuse efforts.

Based on our experience through this waste composition analysis, and the conversations our technicians had with members of the public bringing products to the site in Brent, we think that while signposting residents to other options is essential, it will never be enough to reach optimal reuse rates. Initiatives to act as the final ‘net’, catching the huge number of products still worth reusing, are needed at all household waste and recycling centres in the UK.

Who could the reusable products go to?Some of the products that today end up unnecessarily in recycling bins have obvious financial value: an almost new printer, a coffee machine or a blender, for example. Not to mention the fully reusable ice machine that someone brought to the recycling centre, after an agreed sale on eBay for £600 didn’t work out. These could be directly sold by owners online, or donated to charities like British Heart Foundation, or start-ups like Brighton’s Tech-Takeback for resale.

Other products might not have an immediate monetary value, but could still be reused. Vacuum cleaners, toasters and kettles could for example be invaluable for families moving into assisted accommodation, or on low incomes.

Products requiring repairs could be fixed and redistributed in Fixing Factories. or donated to community repair initiatives for repair, such as repair cafes or Restarters groups.

How did we test the productsOur team of Restart repairers visually inspected the plug, lead and unit of all small electrical items brought to the site, PAT tested them for safety, then assessed their functionality. The Restarters then placed the products in one of six categories: Fully reusable; only external damage; economical repair, costly repair, end of life or unknown.

It is worth noting we were not able to test the functionality of a further 34% of items due to lack of power cables or linked products, so more comprehensive testing would be likely to identify an even higher proportion of products that could be reused by others with or without simple repair. And our research didn’t factor in 32 laptops that were brought that week to the same centre, as laptops are diverted for reuse systematically thanks to the work of our Fixing Factory.

A small study with big findings This was a small study which could have big implications. If reusable products are being recycled at the same scale across the country, the level of waste is a scandal. In a climate emergency and a cost of living crisis we simply cannot afford to waste working products at this scale.

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Sewing machines are a common sight at Restart Parties, Repair Cafés and other repair events. But while they’re most often used to fix clothes, we’ve also seen hundreds of broken machines that need repairing themselves.

When a sewing machine goes wrong, it’s not always obvious how to get it working again. So we were delighted to welcome back the wonderful Jennie Caminada from Cheekyhandmades to lead this online skillshare session about what to look out for when troubleshooting a broken or malfunctioning sewing machine.

From needle problems and thread quality speed control to adjusting bobbin tension and oiling, we covered the most common problems you’re likely to come across and shared tips for keeping your sewing machine running smoothly.

Catch up on it all with the recording below:

(Can’t see the video above? Watch it directly on YouTube here)

And if you prefer written information, see what our community repair wiki has to say about sewing machines.

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Right to Repair continued to be a key focus for our advocacy work in 2022. Most of our contributions happened via the European Right to Repair Campaign – which we co-steer alongside other non-profits and companies pushing for ambitious regulations. Restart’s strategy sees legislation on repair as the most effective way to bring change to all manufacturers. And we argue that the European Union is currently still the area with highest potential to impact legislation globally.

Progress in Europe, although slowThere’s been plenty happening in the last year. From our perspective, the most encouraging achievement was the agreement on a Battery Directive, which will require manufacturers of most consumer products to come up with designs allowing users to replace their battery themselves, and to move away from disposable, “single-battery” devices. We’re also happy that ecodesign measures for smartphones and tablets were finalised. While far from perfect, they will for the first time require manufacturers to make a range of spare parts available for at least 7 years to consumers, and a larger range to independent repairers; manufacturers will also have to commit to making available software and security updates for at least 5 years once a product is removed from the market. This could be game-changing, as plenty of devices become unsupported far too soon.

Unfortunately, it will be years before these laws come into effect, despite the urgent need of limiting the amount of e-waste we generate. Equally worryingly, we witnessed plenty of delays in new legislation announced by the European Union: a sign that manufacturers and others are pushing back on Right to Repair, and that European institutions may lack sufficient capacity to deliver on their theoretically bold commitments.

Looking ahead, we expect (slow) progress in 2023 on European legislation on the need for spare parts for a broader range of products, as well as on repair options within legal guarantee periods and on the repairability of printers. How much progress? It’s hard to estimate for now.

Elsewhere: lots happening in the USThe year ended in a bittersweet way in the United States, with the first Right to Repair legislation signed in New York state – an important step, however weakened substantially by industry lobbying until the very last minute. This means that for example spare parts and repair information availability will not be required for products provided in business-to-business and business-to-government contracts, which include electronics provided to schools or hospital. Also, the legislation will allow bundling of spare parts: selling multiple parts combined (more expensive) – something that we’ve successfully opposed in the most recent European regulations on smartphones and tablets.

Another emerging trend – especially in the United States – is the attempt by manufacturers to come up with their own version of “Right to Repair”, to try reduce likelihood of more ambitious legislation. This is our interpretation of the recent announcement of the removal of digital locks for farmers’s tractors by John Deere, included in a non-legally binding “Memorandum of understanding” with the American Farm Bureau Federation, which in return was asked (!) not to campaign for more ambitious regulations.

Beyond the United States, we see interest growing on legislation to bring Right to Repair in Australia, India and elsewhere, but we need more!

What about the UK?Right to Repair is still not a priority for the UK government, regrettably. We expect that some of the new EU policies will eventually either be adopted by the UK, or that they will at least inspire similar initiatives. However we don’t see signs of this happening any time soon. It’s a shame, as there’s plenty of areas in which they UK could act in a faster and more compelling way compared to other countries: for example removing VAT from the cost of all repairs, one of the key asks of our petition.

There’s plenty of inspiration that the UK could take from other countries – starting with the repairability index in France, which could help consumers make better informed decisions when buying a new product, to the Austrian repair fund, which helps substantially reduce the price of repairs by providing families vouchers with 50% discounts for values up to 200eu per year.

What’s next for the Right to Repair movement?Despite relative progress on legislation, we are very concerned about the affordability of repair, as well as the growing threat that software poses to product repairability and longevity. None of the legislation in the pipeline in the UK, US or EU directly tackles the cost of repair: requiring manufacturers to make spare parts available doesn’t mean that the parts will be affordable. Also, legislation on new products doesn’t increase the repairability of existing products – hence, our ask that legislators consider fiscal measures to make repair more affordable and universally accessible. In parallel, some manufacturers are using software to restrict the kind of spare parts that can be used to complete a repair: another way of increasing the cost of repairs. Lack of commitment for long-term software support for many products also contributes to the unnecessary premature obsolescence of way too many products.

In 2023 we’ll continue to put pressure on policymakers using evidence and insights from the thousands of community repair events held around the UK and Europe. We’ll have new campaigns, both as Restart and the European Right to Repair Campaign, to remind everyone that we’re still far from making repair the norm. And we’ll amplify the voices of community repair groups, whose activities prove again and again that repair is possible and in much demand everywhere.

The post What’s next for Right to Repair? appeared first on The Restart Project.

As 2022 comes to a close and the holiday season is fast approaching, we want to celebrate the past year in a festive way.

On the 12th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 12 new London groups!Community repair has been blossoming this year, in London and all over the UK. In the capital, 12 new community groups have joined Restarters and we cannot wait to see what they get up to in the new year.

On the 11th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 11 Mer-IT trainees!In June, 11 young people were trained by Mer-IT on how to build, repair, and upgrade a PC. The course was funded by and run as part of the Fixing Factories initiative and led to a number of trainees continuing to a work experience placement. You’ll hear a bit more about Fixing Factories later on in this list…

On the 10th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me our 10 year birthday!We were happy to be able to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the first Restart Party with so many members of our London community this June. It’s been a busy decade of growth, learning, and pushing for change, and we’re so excited to see what comes next.

On the 9th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 9 conference speeches!We were honoured to be asked to share our work and spread the message of Right to Repair at so many conferences this year including: Electrical Product Safety Conference, AMDEA’s 2050 – Appliances of the Future: The Road to Net Zero, East Midlands Fixfest, Royal Society of Chemistry, C40 Cities, Low Carbon Design Institute, Zero Waste Symposium 2022, and of course Fixfest 2022. Thanks for having us!

On the 8th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 8 Brent work placements!We were super happy that through Brent Fixing Factory we could facilitate some training and education for eight future repairers. We are always looking for ways to work more with repair businesses and this includes encouraging and supporting the next generation of professional repairers.

On the 7th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 7,764 event attendees!Let’s take a look at the data. This year, over 30,000 hours of volunteering were logged on Restarters by community groups, with 8,400 items repaired, and 23 tonnes of waste and 246 tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided. This is a massive achievement and a sight for sore eyes after a difficult couple of years for in-person repair.

On the 6th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me the 6th annual Repair Day!This year we celebrated the sixth International Repair Day with the theme ‘Repair Everywhere’. Repairers from all over the world sent in footage of them repairing in the most unusual places they could find in an effort to prove that anyone can repair no matter where they are or the skills they have (see #1!).

On the 5th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 50 Fixfest sessions!This year’s Fixfest spanned 50 sessions both in-person and online. Nearly 150 people attended the event in Brussels to share their knowledge and make new connections.

Hear from the attendees themselves on Restart Podcast Ep. 80: Voices of Fixfest 2022.

On the 4th day of Christmas, Restart gave to me our top 4 podcast episodes!Our 4 most listened to podcast episodes were:

Restart Podcast Ep. 78: Meet our new(ish) Co-Director, Fiona Dear
Restart Podcast Ep. 73: Repair Café Aotearoa New Zealand
Restart Podcast Ep. 72: Maintaining your bike and your community, with Jenni Gwiazdowski
Restart Podcast Ep. 75: The law and repair: it’s complicated, with Aaron Perzanowski

And did you know that our listener numbers put us in the top 5% of podcasts?!

On the 3rd day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 317 repair businesses!We made great progress this year on London Repairs – our London based repair directory. We mapped eight new boroughs in West London, with funding from West London Waste Authority and added 147 businesses through this work, bringing our total to 317.

On the 2nd day of Christmas, Restart gave to me 2 Fixing Factories!Perhaps our most exciting achievement of the year was opening two brand new Fixing Factories in Brent and Camden. It’s a project that we have seen transform from a glimmer of an idea to two physical spaces, and we are so excited to keep developing the project with all of you.

On the 1st day of Christmas, Restart gave to me a fixer in a big tree!This year for Repair Day, our worldwide fixing community came together to show that repair is everywhere. We had an amazing turnout including from our friends over in Aotearoa, a whole 11,000 miles away who filmed this video of repair happening on a beautiful old tree branch.

What about 2023?We’re so excited about what’s in store in 2023. Our big plans include Fixfest UK, more progress on Fixing Factories and a new campaign to keep electronics going for longer.

Thanks for being here in our 10th year and here’s to the next! If you are able to support our work, please consider giving what you can.

Donate here

[Images by Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY 2.0.]

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Our not-so-new Co-Director, Fiona Dear, reflects on an Autumn of bringing the repair movement together.

This Autumn was busy. By September I’d spent 9 months getting my head round the world of electronic repair – and all the issues that link with it. Tech and software. Reuse and digital access. Community repair and data. E-waste, minerals and the waste sector. And our fight for the right to repair. So it was brilliant to have a couple of opportunities to bring this to life this Autumn.

The wonderful world of FixfestFirst up we had Fixfest at the end of October: 3 days of eye opening discussion and, of course, fixing. The event brought together repairers and tinkers from around the world. Bringing the repair movement together gave us a chance to learn from each other, be inspired and chew over the challenges that we’re all trying to fix.

A recurring question was: How can we make repair more mainstream? We all love it, but we know it’s not for everyone. We know the barriers include cost – of spare parts and labour, a lack of confidence in fixing – especially with electronics, knowing where to find repair services. And all of that within a system that makes repair too difficult and has generated an autopilot of buying new when things break.

A world of solutionsWhilst pondering this challenge, Fixfest also offered solutions: We heard about how repair vouchers, which cover 50% of repair costs up to €200, are encouraging more people to repair in Austria. We were surrounded by the wonderful people behind community repair. The wonderful people who offer low-or-no cost repair, and get people involved in fixing their own things everywhere from Denmark to a Ugandan refugee camp. This ecosystem of repair cafes and restart parties has sprung up to make repair more accessible, lower cost and build people’s confidence in fixing things themselves. We talked business models with those that are taking community repair to the high street. And we compared notes on repair directories in Buenos Aires and Vienna with our map in London, designed to make finding a repair service easier.

And what of the root issue of how things are made? We took the fight for the Right to Repair to EU politicians on the first day of Fixfest. We then heard about policies like the French repair index, which clearly communicates, at point of sale, how repairable products are. This is shifting the choices people are making, and manufacturers are taking note. And we got our teeth into some campaign planning.

Taking repair to the worldAnd we finished, as we should, with a repair cafe. We were blown away by Repair Together’s magical mobile repair cafe. Starting with what looks like a regular trailer, the sides fold up to form a canopy. Further panels fold down and pull out to form work surfaces – with trenches near the edge to stop screws rolling off the worktops. An ingenious coffee station at the back fuels the conversations that bring community repair to life.

There was a healthy mix of big questions posed and thoughtful solutions offered. It’s safe to say that I wasn’t the only one that left with my head buzzing.

Repair everywhere on one day (ish)Having brought together the people that make community repair happen at Fixfest, we went straight into Repair Day, two weeks later. For Repair Day, we brought the global repair community to life by celebrating fixing on and around 15th October. New Zealanders repaired in trees and Germans repaired by the Brandenburg Gate. Repair cafes got fixing across the world at the same time. New groups engaged their politicians. We saw repairathons, and heard repair stories. Together we showed that repair really is everywhere.

And we celebrated the people who make the repair movement happen. Inspired by Repair&Share’s video of the team singing “We Will Fix It” (think “We Will Rock You”), we got the Fixfest delegates involved for our own rendition of ‘We Will Fix It’. It was a brilliant way to end three days of inspiration, and show off the repair community to the world.

Back to the real worldAnd now? After bringing the repair movement together for an Autumn of inspiration, we’ve come back down to earth and had a chance to reflect and recover. Now we’re busy turning our conversations into exciting plans for next year. The challenge is huge, but with the size, scale and creativity of the repair movement that has sprung up, to meet it, we WILL fix it.

Find out more, and see videos, notes and photos from Fixfest here.

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In this episode, we spoke to 7 Fixfest 2022 attendees about where repair is now and where they hope to see it in the future.

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This month, we had a handy conversation with some friends from our sponsor eSpares to answer listeners' questions about household repair.

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To wrap up our summer season, we’re giving listeners a proper introduction to Restart’s new(ish) Co-Director, Fiona Dear.

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We’re celebrating 10 years of Restart! This episode is an auditory snapshot of Restart, hearing from volunteers, friends, and the team.

The post Restart Podcast Ep. 77: Reflecting on our first 10 years appeared first on The Restart Project.

We can't believe it either but today marks the 10 year anniversary of the first Restart Party! That means its time for us to reflect and celebrate.

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We’ve been working to expand the directory to cover 8 new boroughs in West London and we've managed to add 147 businesses to the directory!

The post The Repair Directory now has 300 listings following our West London expansion! appeared first on The Restart Project.

After months of fundraising, recruiting and planning, we’re delighted to be launching our first Fixing Factory in Brent on 23rd April.

The post Fixing Factories: And we’re off appeared first on The Restart Project.

Sophia is an engineer cleaning up data centres for work, and in spare time, a Restart Party host, picker of fruit, reader, singer, and patriarchy smasher.

The post Restart Party Host Profile: Meet Sophia appeared first on The Restart Project.

Announcing a new project, made possible thanks to National Lottery funding, in partnership with climate charity Possible, Ready Tech Go, West London Waste Authority, and Mer IT. Together in London, we're designing and testing two visions of permanent places for community-powered repair: ‘Fixing Factories’.

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Junaid is a pro repairer at his store Sara's Fix in Charing Cross. He enjoys sharing his skills at community events. He's a keen motorcyclist. And he started repairing toys as a child.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Junaid appeared first on The Restart Project.

As 2021 draws to a close, it's time to celebrate what we've accomplished together: in our campaigning work, learning from our data and helping communities fix up computers for those in need. We also remember those we've missed and share hopes for 2022.

The post Celebrating 2021: digital access, learning from our repairs and the Right to Repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

We used our data about broken electronics to learn why they break, focusing on printers, tablets and batteries. Now we’re using these lessons to push for pro-repair regulation.

The post Why our electronics break: what we can learn from nearly 10 years of repairs appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're happy to announce our new sponsorship by eSpares, an online parts store. Companies like eSpares are essential parts of the UK's repair economy. eSpares wants to promote repair in the community, as well as policies that make repair possible.

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Apple announced that some parts, tools, and manuals — starting with iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 — will be made available to individual consumers in the United States from early 2022. We welcome this announcement but remain cautious about the implementation.

The post Apple caves to pressure, giving access to (some) spare parts and repair information to consumers appeared first on The Restart Project.

A YouGov poll we commissioned shows overwhelming support for expanding the Right to Repair in Great Britain. 81% support expanding Right to Repair to laptops, mobiles and tablets.

The post Poll: Overwhelming Support for a Universal Right to Repair in Great Britain appeared first on The Restart Project.

Meet our new Co-Director, leading on our activities in the UK, Fiona Dear. She brings a wealth of policy and campaigning experience, and has a personal commitment to waste issues and grassroots activism.

The post Announcing our new Co-Director Fiona Dear appeared first on The Restart Project.

ITV Tonight covered the Right to Repair, with footage and interviews from Cambridgeshire Repair Cafes and The Restart Project. We're asking viewers to sign our petition to expand the Right to Repair.

The post Right to Repair on ITV Tonight appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're celebrating International Repair Day with a number of activities in the lead up here in London and online. Join us! This year's theme, just in time for UN climate negotiations: repair lowers carbon emissions.

The post Celebrating International Repair Day – repair lowers carbon emissions appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're recruiting a new co-director for The Restart Project, to focus on the UK and London. It's a very special and exciting role. We're inviting expressions of interest.

The post Co-pilot Restart into its second decade – we’re recruiting appeared first on The Restart Project.

“BattCat” is our latest interactive, people-powered investigation into why devices fail. This time we’re asking for your help to learn why repairs involving batteries at community events are often too hard to complete.

The post Help us learn why batteries are too hard to replace appeared first on The Restart Project.

It's hard to characterise this year's reading list - there is probably more "nature" in this list than in previous years. But not the kind you might be expecting. We've also got a fair bit of naughtiness, disruption and, as you might expect, discussion of where people and planet intersect with tech.

The post Fungi, AI, degrowth and disruption: our summer reading list appeared first on The Restart Project.

After we supported London's laptop donation schemes in the last six months, we look back at what we achieved. We are looking at ways to deepen and continue these vital partnerships with grassroots reuse groups as we plan into the future.

The post Our Laptop Repair Team and the ongoing challenge of digital access appeared first on The Restart Project.

The UK should take steps urgently to extend access to spare parts and repair information for all products to everyone and address the high cost of repairs.

The post The UK’s new ‘right to repair’ is not a right to repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our devices come with a hidden environmental impact. We reveal what we learned about different products and how, by repairing our gadgets when they break, we can reduce their overall impact.

The post The environmental impact of our devices: revealing what many companies hide appeared first on The Restart Project.

Tablets break easily and can be hard to repair. In fact most don't last as long as porridge oats in the cupboard. Help us learn why by playing "Tabicat", a fun way to collaboratively analyse community repair data.

The post How do tablets break? Help us find out! appeared first on The Restart Project.

Rosemary hosts Restart Parties in West London. As an environmentalist and Friends of the Earth coordinator, repair is close to her heart. She still uses a Nokia 3410, now on its second replacement battery.

The post Restart Party Host Profile: Meet Rosemary appeared first on The Restart Project.

Today we launch a new petition to the UK government, BEIS and Defra ministers calling for real Right to Repair rules. We need a Right to Repair for all, for more products, that we can afford.

The post New UK petition for the real right to repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

Printers can be frustrating - easy to break and hard to fix. Join PrintCat to help us learn why they fail and push for more repairable future models

The post Help us learn more about printers with PrintCat appeared first on The Restart Project.

For the first time, design for repairability, long-term availability of spare parts and repair information will be written into UK law, creating a precedent. But we don't think there's that much to celebrate yet - here is why.

The post Do we have a Right to Repair in the UK? Not yet appeared first on The Restart Project.

Guest post by Fix It Workshop's Matt Marchant: "Believe it or not, people do ask me which is best: New or old machines? There is of course, no right or wrong answer. My illustration focuses on an old favourite of mine; the Kenwood Chef."

The post Guest post: Old versus new, which is best? appeared first on The Restart Project.

We've been hard at work here at Restart on a new project to explore our repair data and our environmental impact together. We're happy to announce the support of ACTION (Participatory science toolkit against pollution) project, who are helping us incorporate "citizen science" approaches to our data work.

The post Exploring our repair data and our environmental impact together appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're launching, Materials Matter an educational site allowing you to explore the life of your smartphone. We developed this website with support from EIT Raw Materials together with partners of the Replay Project

The post Dive into the life of your phone appeared first on The Restart Project.

We highlight some key moments in the long month of January and help break down the big questions and opportunities in the push for longer-lasting and more repairable products in the UK this year.

The post Our Top 5 questions this year in the UK appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our new campaign in London mobilises donations of laptops, cash and volunteer skills, so that unused laptops can be used by students and people in need.

The post New London laptop campaign and crowdfunder appeared first on The Restart Project.

In its public commitments, Tefal sounds great on repair. But in practice, a qualified electrician had to pressure the French manufacturers to gain access to spare parts. We need Right to Repair enshrined in law, not one merely published on a website by manufacturers.

The post Manufacturers and why we can’t rely on their commitments — a DIY repair story appeared first on The Restart Project.

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee released its new report on electronic waste. In it we can hear the voices of the repair community. The Committee calls for the right to repair and a smarter approach to materials and electronics waste.

The post Parliamentary committee heard us, and calls for Right to Repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

We partnered with Catbytes in London to support their laptop donation scheme and help them repair their devices. Our volunteers were happy to help increase the number of laptops available for reuse by people in need.

The post Fixing laptops for reuse in the community, with Catbytes in Lewisham appeared first on The Restart Project.

"Repair is Essential" - this is the theme we chose for this year's International Repair Day. In London, an online team of volunteers mapped 45+ repair businesses in London to be considered for inclusion. Small groups met repair businesses in Crystal Palace, Shepherd's Bush and Tooting.

The post Repair is essential! Here is how we celebrated International Repair Day appeared first on The Restart Project.

After more than a year of surveys, interviews with group organsiers and repairers, design and development work, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve now added support for non-electrical/electronic items in our repairs database, the "Fixometer"

The post You can now record non-electronic items on the Fixometer appeared first on The Restart Project.

Normally on International Repair Day we run a large Restart Party, to celebrate the day together with as many of our volunteers as possible. This year, on 17 October we invite Londoners to help us celebrate the independent repair shops who help us all stay connected, especially during lockdown.

The post Celebrating International Repair Day and London Repair Week appeared first on The Restart Project.

The Repair Directory lists reliable repair businesses in London. We are asking the public to submit their favourite London repair shops!

The post Help us expand the Repair Directory across London appeared first on The Restart Project.

The need for electronic devices is high. We look at how Hackney Fixers, a community repair project in London, is reusing donated laptops to support students.

The post Donated laptops help keep everyone connected appeared first on The Restart Project.

Because some of us are definitely escaping this summer through books, we thought we’d publish an extended summer reading list. This is a follow-up to the initial list shared in our July radio show. We hope you enjoy it!

The post Our extended summer reading list appeared first on The Restart Project.

It's been a big fortnight for those watching big tech and their impact on the planet, here in the UK and beyond. Apple came out with some big announcements, which we'll evaluate in this post. But first, some reminders of what their competitors are up to. (Or rather, what they are not up to.)

The post Scrutinising big tech’s environmental commitments – comparing Apples and Amazons appeared first on The Restart Project.

Last night we wrapped up the second edition of Fixfest UK, the first online edition! Thank you to the 200+ people who “attended” Fixfest UK over the past month.

The post Fixfest UK: a month of online exchange and learning appeared first on The Restart Project.

Last week, we were invited to give oral evidence to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC). We gave examples of how the current system is broken, and how we can prevent waste through the three pillars to the right to repair.

The post Our oral evidence on electronic waste and repair to the House of Commons appeared first on The Restart Project.

The Restart Project is a partner of "Sharepair", a project funded by Interreg NW Europe to build a digital infrastructure for citizens in the repair economy

The post Introducing the Sharepair project appeared first on The Restart Project.

Fixfest UK will run during the month of June (and part of July) with space 200 in our in online gathering for repair activists. We’ll share perspectives, inspire and learn from each other and continue building towards a fairer, more capable and greener future.

The post UK repair activists: join us for Fixfest, 4 June – 9 July appeared first on The Restart Project.

The pandemic presents huge challenges to communities around the world, including community repair groups. Fortunately, we see the world through the lens of repair and are practised problem-solvers. We've been inspired to see how groups around the world have adapted online.

The post Producing great online repair events – learning from around the world appeared first on The Restart Project.

A poll by YouGov shows that more Britons would like to repair their smartphones instead of replacing them. For laptops, a stronger majority prefer repair. But there are major barriers.

The post Poll: Britons want to repair electronics but there are major barriers appeared first on The Restart Project.

Many groups in our network are using our software to log community repair data after events. We asked some of them to tell us more about their experience with data. What motivated them to start recording data at repair events? What have they used repair data for?

The post Repair data: why community groups collect and share appeared first on The Restart Project.

For Earth Day, we ran an online activity called "Mobiles Come from the Earth" aimed at kids, but really for anybody over 10 years old. This was the first of the kind that we've run, building on educational resources we created together with partners in five countries with European funding from EIT Raw Materials.

The post Earth Day activity “Mobiles Come from the Earth” appeared first on The Restart Project.

In this webinar co-hosted with ABI Electronics, we explore how we can maintain and service all Covid-19 related medical equipment given it will be put under unprecedented use in the coming weeks and months.

The post Repairing ventilators and COVID19 medical equipment – the big challenge ahead appeared first on The Restart Project.

In the UK, critical care equipment is a serious issue. Many have observed we have one of the lowest rates of critical care beds per capita. Given this, are we prepared to maintain and repair this equipment, which will be put under unprecedented use?

The post Ventilators and medical equipment – urgent need to prepare to repair COVID-19 appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're celebrating a Right to Repair milestone from Brussels this week, with the Circular Economy Action Plan. We ask whether the UK government is serious about wanting to "do better" than Europe.

The post Great Right to Repair news from Brussels – we must benefit in the UK appeared first on The Restart Project.

Alison is a life-long DIYer who has a real can-do spirit about maintenance and fixing, and a budding interest in brewing. She laments the fact that some women feel discouraged to repair, and loves being involved in our Rosie the Restarter skillshares.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Alison appeared first on The Restart Project.

London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) asked us last year to review its “roadmap for circular economy of electricals” and to analyse best practices in Europe. We set out how London can promote of reuse and repair of electricals and electronics, prevent e-waste, and recycle better.

The post London can be a leading city in our sector – here’s how appeared first on The Restart Project.

We created educational resources on the raw materials in electronics for use at community repair events. This leaflet and set of cards that match with commonly found components in electronics has proven really popular in the UK. We will continue to make them the centrepiece of our outreach.

The post Revealing materials inside electronics – with repair groups, museums and young people appeared first on The Restart Project.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATE (27th March): We have made the decision to run Fixfest UK as a series of online only events.

We're super excited to announce the place and date of the second-ever Fixfest UK, in Glasgow on 20th June.

The post Announcing Fixfest UK 2020 appeared first on The Restart Project.

We've added south London borough Lambeth to our Repair Directory, and we're getting ready to add more in the coming year, together with our London community. We've also made a change to reliability criteria for businesses.

The post Repair Directory expanded – and more in the pipeline appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’re getting our calendar ready for the beginning of 2020. The first months of the year are a great time to recruit new volunteers, engage the public on the issues underpinning our throw-away economy, but also to eat cake, to share hot drinks and connect with neighbours.

The post Getting ready for 2020 appeared first on The Restart Project.

With 2019 drawing to a close, we're feeling reflective here at Restart. This year has been one of the best yet for repair, so let's look back at some of the highlights from the last twelve months.

The post A big year in repair activism appeared first on The Restart Project.

We hosted a celebration of International Repair Day event in Brixton at our home 3Space International House. It was the biggest event we've run in years. We wish every Restart Party could be like this!

The post International Repair Day with London businesses appeared first on The Restart Project.

Around 5 years ago when Restart consisted of just a few dozen Londoners, we decided to set up a shared space where we could pool our knowledge and experience. Now any member of our online community Restarters.net can contribute!

The post Sharing skills – the easy way! appeared first on The Restart Project.

Runder Tisch Reparatur (German Repair Round Table) ran such an inspiring global Fixfest in Berlin. The event embodied everything we'd hoped: DIY spirit, free programme and space for exchange, thought-provoking keynote speakers, and two "fringe" events (the Climate Strike march and a repair data dive).

The post Second-ever global Fixfest in Berlin appeared first on The Restart Project.

Last month, on the invitation of Virtual School at Croydon Council, we worked with 15-20 asylum-seeking youth in a summer school. We created a short, 9-session curriculum based on the requests of the young people themselves. Students upgraded and earned their own laptop.

The post Laptop ninja summer school appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're really excited to participate in the second-ever global Fixfest in Berlin later this month. While many members of our network from Belgium, Italy, Norway, Sweden and here in the UK can fund their own travel, others cannot. Thanks to generous funding from the Shuttleworth Foundation, we've been able to sponsor a larger, global delegation to the event.

The post Our delegation to Fixfest 2019 in Berlin appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’ve just released a set of new educational resources that help us open our electronics and open our eyes to the raw materials inside that we are simply throwing away. Even when we recycle electronics, most of these “critical raw materials” are not getting recouped.

The post Meet the materials we need to save the planet, but are throwing away appeared first on The Restart Project.

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 anywhere in the UK, we're here for you.

The post Challenging throw-away products on The One Show appeared first on The Restart Project.

It's an annual tradition here at Restart — our top reads for the summer. The theme seems to be "none of this new — or near-future — but why does it feel that way?"

The post Our summer reading list: the not-new that feels new appeared first on The Restart Project.

Following much attention to the climate crisis, and the passage of a binding net-zero emissions target here in the UK, we've had quite a couple of weeks promoting the Right to Repair. Leaders of two political parties that experienced a surge of support in recent elections read and endorsed The Manchester Declaration, a document drafted by 59 community repair activists.

The post Big endorsements for Right to Repair in the UK appeared first on The Restart Project.

Steve is a life-long tinkerer and fixer, who loves the "Marie Kondo" repairs the best — the ones that spark joy. He enjoys repurposing electronics with his kids, cycling and running. He still remembers his first repair - a Walkman - at age 10.

The post Restarter profile: Meet Steve appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're celebrating having reached 1,000 events logged in our repairs database, affectionately known as the Fixometer. We started alone in London in 2014 on this project, and we have 110 groups in 12 countries who have logged events and contributed repair data to our network.

The post 1,000 events logged in our network appeared first on The Restart Project.

With the latest policy discussion on the “net zero” UK targets, we feel the need to contribute to the conversation about a whole economy shift to a green economy, including the repair economy.

The post Taking care of resources in fair, net-zero economy appeared first on The Restart Project.

The environmental cost of our electronics consumption is a global problem, requiring a global response. For Earth Day, we shout about the global issue of climate change and electronic waste while we recognise the power of repair to respond to these challenges.

The post Repairing for the Earth, repairing everywhere appeared first on The Restart Project.

Jamie started fixing a couple of years ago after getting fed up with headphones breaking. A Maplin alum, he now fixes for a living, but finds time to volunteer and share his skills. He loves bass guitar, cycling, model trains and film.

The post Restarter profile: Meet Jamie appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our Repair Directory lists 100 businesses from 11 boroughs in North and East London. We share insights from our work so far, and ask your input to help develop it further

The post Help us improve our Repair Directory appeared first on The Restart Project.

We believe that community events like Restart Parties create a special, radical space for people to connect with others. A guest post by a participant attending a Restart Party run by a local group in Kilburn, at Abbey Community Centre illustrates how.

The post Hope in the dark: an account from a Restart Party appeared first on The Restart Project.

For Open Data Day, March 2, we celebrated our first ever open dive into our repair database, AKA the Fixometer. We were focused on gleaning insights from our data on over 2,200 repairs of desktops, laptops and tablets to push for longer-lasting, repairable devices.

The post A community dive into our data on computer repairs appeared first on The Restart Project.

We are celebrating, as we’ve reached over 10,000 devices recorded through our database, affectionately known as the Fixometer. We are collecting this data together with our network, which consists of 60 groups in 12 countries.

The post 10,000 devices recorded on our database appeared first on The Restart Project.

You or friends and family probably have one gathering dust somewhere. Instead of sending for recycling or to the shredder, you can give your Nexus 4 new life – we’ll inspire and educate the next generation of repairers.

The post Donate your abandoned mobile, inspire the next generation appeared first on The Restart Project.

After months of campaigning for the Right to repair, we welcome the historic precedent set out by new ecodesign regulations, despite some disappointments the repair movement will have to focus on in future.

The post Massive precedent set for repairable products appeared first on The Restart Project.

We appeared today on BBC Breakfast and various BBC radio shows, talking about the importance of repair and changes we need to be able to repair the stuff we own and keep it longer.

The post Fixing in communities, fixing the system appeared first on The Restart Project.

We joined forces with Brussels-based partners to organise a flashmob to ask EU member states to stand for our right to repair our appliances and prevent unnecessary waste. Final votes on repairability criteria for dishwashers and washing machines can set crucial precedents.

The post Defending the right to repair in Brussels appeared first on The Restart Project.

Together with a broken fridge and broken appliances, we took part in what must have been the first-ever protest for spare parts, in front of the EU institutions this morning. An excellent start to a multi-year campaign to ask Europe to defend citizens' right to repair.

The post First protest for the right to repair in Brussels appeared first on The Restart Project.

This month and in January, the EU member states may throw out over two years’ work on creating better product standards for appliances and electronics. We need to pressure the UK to support our right to repair.

The post A unique opportunity for the UK to support repairable products appeared first on The Restart Project.

If we inspired you to rethink technology, to take action, or to help others, it is time to show your support! Your donations will power our growing "right to repair" activism in 2019.

The post Give to power our repair activism in 2019 appeared first on The Restart Project.

Recent research at the UK and European level has shown that people want longer lasting and more repairable products. These findings can push climate policy changes towards a more sustainable, resource efficient economy.

The post Compelling evidence that people want repairable products appeared first on The Restart Project.

We appeared this week on BBC Breakfast, talking about the importance of repair. Here is a summary of what we do and why repair is so crucial to fix our throw-away economy.

The post Fixing our throw-away economy appeared first on The Restart Project.

On Saturday in Manchester, 59 community repair activists from all over the UK got together to mingle, share, help each other out and think collectively about growing our movement and bringing down the barriers to repair and longer-lasting products.

The post Inspired and energised from Fixfest UK appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’re urgently mobilising to save the crucial, pro-Right-to-Repair measures in the European Commission's "Circular Economy Package". We stand to lose over two years' work on creating better product standards for longer-lasting appliances and electronics.

The post Urgent Right to Repair mobilisation in Europe appeared first on The Restart Project.

After summer holidays in August, we are back on Restart Radio. We now have a new slot with Resonance 104.4FM at 5pm on the second Tuesday of each month. We will also keep producing a monthly podcast with Dave Pickering, which will be published on our website.

The post Announcing our new radio season appeared first on The Restart Project.

Restarters.net combines our tool for organising events and measuring their impact (AKA the Fixometer) with our wiki and a new discussion forum. This is the first global space for fixer volunteers to join with event hosts, and spread community repair.

The post Fixers and organisers, time to join our platform appeared first on The Restart Project.

Every year, "Earth Overshoot Day" is an awful day on the Anthropocene calendar. It is the day in the year by which humans will have taken more from the earth than the planet can naturally renew. This year, Earth Overshoot Day coincides with World Wide Web day.

The post Earth Overshoot and World Wide Web Day appeared first on The Restart Project.

We respond to a mini documentary about ‘Dr. Tesla Frankenstein’ who shares the obstacles to DIY repairs of Tesla cars. He is a firm believer in the right to repair and poses very important questions about ownership and the future.

The post Lessons from a “rogue” backyard mechanic appeared first on The Restart Project.

The company asked people to queue in Soho for the opportunity to smash up their existing mobile phone, and win a new mobile. We immediately shared our disgust with this spectacle, which seemed to promote destruction of functioning mobiles, that could have second and third lives.

The post Huawei’s smashing spectacle of planetary significance appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're offering way more to volunteers than just our "Fixometer" which is becoming the engine driving a much larger online platform. Read about what we have in the works, for public beta release later in July.

The post Exciting new online developments to grow activity offline appeared first on The Restart Project.

Designer Forrest Radford, who attended a Restart Party while a student five years ago, is now launching a repair-related Kickstarter campaign. He remembers "In less than an hour David had shown me the dusty guts of my Mac, we cleaned it out and put it back together; it booted like new."

The post Guest post: How cleaning the dusty guts of my laptop changed my life appeared first on The Restart Project.

Proprietary augmented reality (AR) software also offers up the possibility to outsource the troubleshooting and problem solving work in physical repairs - turn them more into mechanical, low-paid grunt work. We present the positive alternative.

The post Jobs of the future, skills and sustainable consumption appeared first on The Restart Project.

Monique is a software developer who loves simple fixes and a decent pair of shoes. She fondly remembers her math teacher who abandoned the curriculum to teach her Fortran.

The post Restarter profile: Meet Monique appeared first on The Restart Project.

An attempt at repair-making is always a risk, and so must be accompanied with a side order of hope. Through repetition and practice, repair-skills grow and spread and, through time, many small actions become bigger ones, many hopes join together.

The post Guest post: Hopeful Repair, Repairing Hopefully appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve been granted two years funding from Nesta and the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to actively promote Restart Parties and spread community repair across England.

The post Backing to scale our activities closer to home appeared first on The Restart Project.

The patterns and trends in our repair data can give us powerful insights into the repair movement, and we now have over 6,000 device repairs captured in the Fixometer. We've learned how to query, clean, and we've made progress on standardising our data.

The post A journey into our repair data appeared first on The Restart Project.

To help reduce our barriers to repair, today we are launching the beta version of our Repair Directory, a tool allowing users to quickly search for businesses based on location and type of device.

The post Launching our Beta Repair Directory appeared first on The Restart Project.

Problems with the electronics and appliances are endemic, and industry is increasingly taking away our right to repair products, let alone making better products. We're tired of the "take, make and dispose" economy, and there is a role for regulation. Enter Europe.

The post Let’s tell Europe: we want repairable appliances, screens and computers appeared first on The Restart Project.

We recently surveyed the Restart community and those curious about getting involved. We wanted to take the pulse - hear what is working and what could be improved to help us shape a new online space for everyone. Thanks to 117 of you from 18 countries who took part. Here's what you said

The post Community survey: the results are in! appeared first on The Restart Project.

"Internet health" has multiple, connected meanings. And the crisis in trust goes far beyond privacy concerns, it reaches deep into other connected institutions: electronic supply chains, threats to the "right to repair" and recycling systems.

The post Internet health – curing toxic and throw-away economies appeared first on The Restart Project.

Just shy of 50 million tonnes of e-waste will be produced globally in this year. Earth Day 2018 takes place on 22nd April, it is a global moment of civic and political action to protect our shared home. The Restart Project is calling for action on e-waste this Earth Day!

The post Take action on E-waste for Earth Day appeared first on The Restart Project.

We want to build a new, central space for the whole Restart community - a space to complement or even replace some of the many current channels. But we need your feedback to make it work!

The post A new online home for the Restart community appeared first on The Restart Project.

We've repaired for over five years in our communities. Now we are witnessing worrying developments, including the emergence of products that are simply — and unnecessarily — disposable. Some are even single-use.

The post The crime of disposability appeared first on The Restart Project.

Thanks to Dave Pickering, who has now produced 30 engaging documentary podcasts for us! This is a real milestone. Besides Ugo and Janet, he is the person who has been longest working for The Restart Project.

The post Thirty cheers for our podcaster Dave Pickering appeared first on The Restart Project.

We don't measure success simply by the number of objects fixed - success also comes in the form of changed attitudes, greater confidence, more enthusiasm for repair, or understanding of our wider patterns of resource use.

The post Changing attitudes and actions: research with Nottingham Trent University appeared first on The Restart Project.

An Italian sound engineer, she shocked her future course convenors by acing the entrance exam, as a woman. Stefania loves repairing at community events because it helps her feel connected to others.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Stefania appeared first on The Restart Project.

We've researched the changing landscape of the commercial repair sector in East London: some smaller businesses are finding it tough to compete with superstores and large manufacturers, and the next generation of younger repairers face an uncertain career path.

The post Portraits of repair businesses in East London appeared first on The Restart Project.

We had a huge year last year, thanks to a larger team and steady funding support and our core of dedicated volunteers in London. In 2018, we look to build on last year's work and add a couple of small new exciting projects.

The post Our plans for 2018 appeared first on The Restart Project.

Restarter Steve Cook refurbished his ZX Spectrum, a long and involved process which involved help from online enthusiasts of this 1980s computer. It's now better than it was when new, and Steve takes us on a tour of the ZX Spectrum's past and future.

The post Guest post: Repairing the ZX Spectrum – better than new appeared first on The Restart Project.

Find out more about the improvements in our latest release of the Fixometer - version 3.0 AKA "Commutator".

The post Responding to community needs with the latest Fixometer release appeared first on The Restart Project.

We have a keen interest in electronics recycling for the simple reason that the harder it is to recycle something, the harder it is to fix it first. Fixers have similar needs to recyclers – ease of disassembly and documentation for disassembly.

The post Why we care about recycling appeared first on The Restart Project.

Maker and Hackney Fixer Bridget Harvey shares some insights in the deeper meanings of community repair. This guest blog post was originally a lightning talk delivered at Fixfest in October 2017.

The post Guest post: The meaning of community repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

Stung by the revelations from Apple about slowing iPhone performance? We're here to help. Bring your phone and the new battery to an upcoming Restart Party and we can work with you to give some new charge to your older phone.

The post Power up 2018 by changing your iPhone battery – we can help appeared first on The Restart Project.

For us to believe that retailers are serious about repair and reuse, we need to see them fully integrated into their whole business models. Instead of PR, we need evidence of design for longevity, and greater guarantees on products.

The post Repair as PR stunt: retailers, give us more than clever campaigns appeared first on The Restart Project.

Apple admitted it has released software updates reducing performance for some of its iPhone models, when the capacity of the battery degrades. However they didn't address the exact circumstances and why users are not notified. We think we deserve more transparency from them and other manufacturers.

The post What Apple didn’t tell us about iPhone batteries and performance appeared first on The Restart Project.

We appear on The One Show tonight, talking about mobiles and why we - and professionals - struggle to repair so many of them in a cost-effective way. Using mobiles for longer is crucial to reducing their environmental impacts.

The post Why repairing mobiles is not easy enough appeared first on The Restart Project.

We were really chuffed when CNN wanted to come along to Fixfest in October - and this feature was just released on CNN International

The post CNN feature on Restart and Fixfest appeared first on The Restart Project.

Building on work in East London, the aim is to discover as many relevant businesses as possible in three North London boroughs, collect data on them, and then develop and apply criteria for reliable businesses.

The post Mapping commercial repair in three more London boroughs appeared first on The Restart Project.

If everything goes well, we will continue to work together in key areas over coming years. And there was much interest in a Fixfest 2019 hosted by others group - watch this space.

The post The first Fixfest and future Fixfest(s) appeared first on The Restart Project.

We know what world (or off-world) we do not want to see — WALL-E painted that sad picture. But we felt we needed to envision the world we would like to see.

The post Restarted Future: a tour of our new poster appeared first on The Restart Project.

The first version of the Open Repair Data Standard (ORDS) is now ready, following the initial meeting of the Open Repair Alliance's founding members in October during Fixfest.

The post Launching the Open Repair Data Standard appeared first on The Restart Project.

Restart co-founder Ugo Vallauri spoke at Mozilla Festival ("MozFest") 2017: the world's leading festival for the open internet. Mozfest gathered together advocates for a 'healthy internet' and hardware is a big part of this.

The post Listening and speaking at Mozfest 2017 appeared first on The Restart Project.

We celebrated the first ever International Repair Day, which will fall on the third Saturday of October every year from now on. We're just getting started, and next year will be much bigger.

The post The very first International Repair Day appeared first on The Restart Project.

International Repair Day - Saturday, 21st October 2017, is our chance to shout about the importance of repair and the growing global community repair movement. This year is only the beginning!

The post First International #RepairDay – this Saturday 21st October appeared first on The Restart Project.

Open Repair Alliance founding members include The Restart Project (UK), Repair Café Foundation (Holland), Anstiftung Foundation (Germany), Fixit Clinic (US) alongside iFixit.

The post Announcing the International Day of Repair and introducing the Open Repair Alliance appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our friend, Buenos Aires repair activist, designer Marina Pla to help us come up with a visual identity to match our excitement about Fixfest. This is an open and reusable identity, reflecting the challenges of repair.

The post Fixfest’s visual rallying cry appeared first on The Restart Project.

Three days, four venues, only one Fixfest. We're excited to announce our venues for our first ever global gathering of community repair!

The post Venues confirmed for Fixfest 2017: LSE, Museum of London and Greenlab appeared first on The Restart Project.

Tickets will be going live in mid-August - free to activists in our network and for sale for the public. If you want to know the minute they do, leave us your details at the link below and we'll be in touch.

The post Coming soon – tickets to Fixfest! appeared first on The Restart Project.

Smartphone screen repairs can be really tricky. If any answer below is "no" to any of our three questions, please seek out a commercial mobile screen repair instead of coming to a Restart Party.

The post Want to replace a mobile screen at a Restart Party? Three questions for you appeared first on The Restart Project.

Yesterday we hit some big milestones of waste and CO2 prevented, logged by Restart Party hosts across the world: five tons of electronics diverted from waste, and 100,000 kg CO2 prevented through repair.

The post Collective environmental milestones appeared first on The Restart Project.

Based at Mind Andover, Ugly Duckling currently focuses on furniture repair and invited us to their first repair event to share our skills and learn from them. As we started fixing together it was easy to sense a growing level of excitement

The post Starting Restarting over in Andover appeared first on The Restart Project.

Every little bit of data we collect has been going into our Fixometer database, where we are steadily compiling valuable information about which products that are failing the most frequently, why they are failing, and whether we are able to repair them.

The post The power of citizen-generated data: why even failed repairs count appeared first on The Restart Project.

In our last session, we invited a guest speaker to talk about their tech job - and what they felt are some of the "ninja skills" of the future, given the trends of automation and climate change.

The post Restart @school session 10: Future jobs plus a Restart Party appeared first on The Restart Project.

We've put together our annual list of books that we are reading or are earnestly planning to read. Admittedly, this year everything does seem to touch on limits, contradictions and the end of consensus. We can't fight the zeitgeist!

The post Summer Reading List v4.0 appeared first on The Restart Project.

Before launching into an "urban mining" session on raw materials and recycling, we emphasised that reuse always comes before recycling. Then we "mined" with students working to identify the elements and minerals in the parts.

The post Restart @school session 9: Exploring the value of gadgets for reuse and recycling appeared first on The Restart Project.

From Friday, 6 October to Sunday, 8 October, we will be hosting the first international Fixfest in London. People interested in fixing from all over the world — activists, designers, makers, tinkerers, and more — will be able to meet up and share experiences.

The post Save the date for Fixfest – 6-8 October 2017 appeared first on The Restart Project.

Mp3 players have two major advantages as a music-listening device over your phone: they have longer battery life and more storage. And with a bit of patience, you can make an old one better than new.

The post How to make an iPod better than new appeared first on The Restart Project.

We introduced creative problem solving, showing examples of physical and software-based work-arounds, like using assistive touch when a home button breaks. Then we brainstormed "bad" design from our experience fixing, and went through principles behind good design.

The post Restart @school session 8: Creative problem solving and good design appeared first on The Restart Project.

This month we are turning 5. That’s how long an average computer is used before it's replaced. For us, the five year mark is just the beginning. But we cannot carry on without you. You can donate or show your support in other ways.

The post The Restart Project is turning Five! appeared first on The Restart Project.

Many repairs are not so straight-forward. Fault-finding is often the greatest hurdle in a repair. We were rather nervous about this session - partly because over the years working with adults, what we've learned is that it is very difficult to teach

The post Restart @school session 7: Fault-finding appeared first on The Restart Project.

Happy National Volunteers week! Chances are, if you’ve ever been to a Restart Party you’ve met and worked with some of our volunteer Restarters or hosts. They are why we’re a people-powered platform for change, after all. Changing the world isn’t easy though, and we could always use your help! If you’re looking to get started […]

The post Get (re)Started this Volunteers Week appeared first on The Restart Project.

Mobiles help us talk about miniaturisation - and material consequences. We delved into the topic of "critical raw materials", learning about recycling rates, and need to slow our consumption. Then we changed mobile batteries

The post Restart @school session 6: Mobiles, lithium batteries and critical raw materials appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our first repair session – and the students were super excited to learn and show their skills in disassembly. Archer Academy’s IT Manager Khalid provided laptops with broken screens. We started with laptop fundamentals.

The post Restart @school session 5: Understanding Upgradability and Laptop Maintenance appeared first on The Restart Project.

Reading anything interesting at the moment? We want your recommendations for our summer reading list!

The post What’s on your reading list? appeared first on The Restart Project.

We are publishing findings of a research project with Nottingham Trent University to find out more about participants to Restart Parties

The post Learning more about Restart Party participants appeared first on The Restart Project.

We are seeing hints that electronics repair is spreading and proliferating in both primary and secondary school, in Europe and North America.

The post Repair in school, around the world appeared first on The Restart Project.

We were encouraged to stress organisation, preparation and mindful disassembly with year 10 students at Archer Academy in London. Our game controller disassembly and reassembly session worked really well.

The post Restart @school session 4: Researching and getting organised for repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

In our third session with Archer Academy students, we finally got hands-on with gadgets. But not before we took a couple moments to talk about safety.

The post Restart @school session 3: Safety and taking electronics apart appeared first on The Restart Project.

How often do we connect our own predicament with those across the world? In Session 2 of our pilot enrichment project at Archer Academy, we tried to associate the stress we feel in our consumerist, status-focused society with that transferred to workers.

The post Restart @school session 2: Our stress, worker stress appeared first on The Restart Project.

A tinkerer from a young age, Halima hosts workshops for women who want to learn to code. Find out more about how she got involved with the Restart Project.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Halima appeared first on The Restart Project.

We took the opportunity to research commercial repair businesses in East London to come up with initial criteria to help find reliable options

The post How to find reliable commercial repairers? appeared first on The Restart Project.

James has been tinkering from a very young age, honing his skills on dodgy cars and motorbike engines before moving to electrical devices. He organises Restart Parties in Hackney, North London, alongside the Hackney Fixers.

The post Restart Party Host Profile: Meet James appeared first on The Restart Project.

We've started our ten-week enrichment project with Archer Academy students in north London. For our first session, we met the students and delved into what motivates us to take action.

The post Restart @school session 1: The environmental impact of gadgets appeared first on The Restart Project.

This month, we will begin a ten-session enrichment programme with students at the Archer Academy, a school in North London. We will start with a dive into why we need to change our relationship with electronic and get hands-on.

The post Starting restart in schools appeared first on The Restart Project.

The pinking of gadgets, the most visible attempt at "gendering" of gadgets, seems to obscure the more subtle gender-biases built into others. Participate in our Twitter chat about this

The post Twitter chat: Are gadgets ever really gender-neutral? appeared first on The Restart Project.

Restarters in London definitely earned a quiet Christmas holiday. 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.

The post Our recent campaign and important next steps appeared first on The Restart Project.

The holidays can feel overwhelming, so we present over five hours of our favourite radio shows and podcasts, including geek, tinkerer, designer and academic guests that help put everything into new perspective.

The post Restart Radio Top 10 from 2016 appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're small but we're growing to help push for better products, based on our experience helping people fix electronics in communities. Please support us to bring higher-level change

The post We need your support! appeared first on The Restart Project.

We moved back in with our friends from 3Space, an excellent charity that provides space for other charities. But we'll miss Makerversity, our home for three years, where we collaborated with great people.

The post We’ve moved! appeared first on The Restart Project.

We fixed electronics together with MPs, hosted by Helen Hayes MP. As ever, fixing is a way into important conversations about why so much breaks and why we discard so much.

The post Our Restart Party in Parliament appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’re recruiting a couple of student leaders of secondary school age to help lay the foundations for a global student campaign against our throw-away relationship with electronics.

The post Calling student leaders (and their teachers)! appeared first on The Restart Project.

Through December, you can join us on our virtual tour bus round 14 London boroughs. Our Restart the Capital tour of London, supported by Recycle for London is taking us to new places, as well as to old friends who regularly run Restart Parties in their community.

The post We’re touring London – join us! appeared first on The Restart Project.

We would love our friends and supporters to invite their MPs to fix with us at a November Restart Party in Parliament. The time is ripe for government to feel what needs to change!

The post Invite your MP to repair with us! appeared first on The Restart Project.

This narrative frame of "peak stuff" is particularly dangerous because it suggests we are overcoming global, future resource depletion like we are doing with ozone, or we think we already did with acid rain. It lulls us into a very false sense of complacency.

The post Sorry, we haven’t reached ‘peak stuff’ appeared first on The Restart Project.

Tim hosts Restart Parties in greater Camden. He's a "seasoned eco-worrier" who likes seeing people happy when they learn and get stuff repaired. He works four days a week at Haringey Council, and volunteers as well as working on personal projects.

The post Restart Party Host Profile: Meet Tim appeared first on The Restart Project.

We were on the popular TV series Hugh's War on Waste last night on BBC One! A couple of months back, we made a special trip to Stroud to run a Restart Party with Transition Stroud

The post Fixing is our War on Waste appeared first on The Restart Project.

This year, everything feels very near-future. In some sense, the books we have listed here represent the need to understand now in terms of possible, increasingly tangible futures.

The post Summer reading list v 3.0 appeared first on The Restart Project.

Join our special training event in East London on Saturday 23 July to help community groups get started running Restart Parties. The training will provide interested groups with all they need to start running events.

The post Let’s get the party started: Learn how to run a Restart Party appeared first on The Restart Project.

Marie is a Restart Party Host in Leicester who started throwing parties a year ago. She is a PhD researcher at Loughborough University and green activist who knew next to nothing about technology before getting started, and made the link with Leicester Hackspace.

The post Restart Party Host profile: Meet Marie appeared first on The Restart Project.

Trustees will help consolidate and grow our work, becoming a sustainable organisation that turns grassroots energy and momentum into system-level change . We are looking for up to three people to join the Board of Trustees, one with financial management experience. Candidates under the age of 25 are encouraged to apply.

The post We’re looking for trustees appeared first on The Restart Project.

Last week a couple of stories came out featuring the work of self-started Restarters. Without people who take the initiative to plan and host events, community repair would not be possible. We're sharing here, truly proud of what they are achieving.

The post International spotlight on Restarters appeared first on The Restart Project.

We created a film in time for Earth Day. In this short film, we confront the electronic waste mountain. Globally, we produced 42 million tons of this waste last year. It seems abstract as a number but video makes it real.

The post Fixing our massive electronic waste problem appeared first on The Restart Project.

We have created elaborate empathy buffers. Not just in relation to the people who make our gadgets, but to the people most impacted by the massive greenhouse gasses emitted in electronics production.

The post TGIF: Thank God I’m not in a Factory appeared first on The Restart Project.

While Apple's recycling robot represents an important recognition of the need to "close the loop" it is also a mascot for an unreal future still based on mindless buying and discarding with little regard for people and planet

The post Corporate “utopias” vs. messy, human realities appeared first on The Restart Project.

We need a third team member who helps things run better, who finds, implements or creates efficient solutions. This is a very exciting opportunity, so apply and join us!

The post Work with us! Operations Lead vacancy appeared first on The Restart Project.

We learned loads in our women's skillshare, which Sustainable Hackney and the Hackney Fixers helped organise. We had 16 participants and five machines! Sewing machines can be disposable but they can also last decades.

The post Sewing machine maintenance skillshare appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our mission is not just fixing, but connecting the dots between the way we use (and discard!) electronics, and the way they are produced. It is understanding - and intervening to reduce - their social and environmental impacts.

The post Tracing minerals and using our electronics ethically appeared first on The Restart Project.

Over the holidays, between family visits, we got a chance to iFixit's headquarters in central California. iFixit is a massive inspiration and ally.

The post A visit to iFixit: dynamo of repair activism in the US appeared first on The Restart Project.

As we "restart" in 2016, we still have some memorable stories to share, including Fairphone repairs, some challenging but worthwhile laptop, TV and musical instrument repairs, and an amusing vintage device that will make you laugh.

The post Top Fixes of 2015 appeared first on The Restart Project.

This clickbait headline caught our attention: "Suck it, Hippies: Study Shows Material Gifts Can Bring Happiness". But we need greater insight than a six-week psychology study.

The post Material gifts, durability and our common future appeared first on The Restart Project.

We are looking to work with institutions and educators who can help us find appropriate ways to catalyse restarting within schools. A school in New York kicked things off, and now we are talking with two schools in London about collaboration in 2016.

The post Restarting with educators and students appeared first on The Restart Project.

Do you end up doing loads of fixing for loved ones during the holidays? Turn these moments into something great for everybody, by asking friends and family for a donation. Your ask and their donation reinforces that repair and maintenance have real value for society.

The post Fundraise while restarting during the holidays! appeared first on The Restart Project.

This year, we've gone from strength to strength. The only catch is, we fell behind in our online fundraising. Your donations help keep our community events free for all, and help multiply our reach.

The post Funding drive to power Restart in 2016 appeared first on The Restart Project.

On Cyber Monday, and the beginning of climate talks in Paris, we want to give real, concrete actions for individuals to take to make a change. We need your help, and your social network reach.

The post Share your social network to unleash a global Restart appeared first on The Restart Project.

We would like to suggest much more reflection and critical engagement within our digital inclusion peers about an unquestioning, passive "consumption" model, not only of the hardware itself, but of software and the infrastructure that fuels the internet.

The post Reframing “digital inclusion” appeared first on The Restart Project.

We had a great opportunity to further reflect on what we've learned and the challenges we face during the past couple of days at two excellent events, The Maker Assembly and an event on makerspaces and sustainable development.

The post Sustainable and equitable maker (and fixer) communities appeared first on The Restart Project.

Thanks to Ada Lovelace Day, and frankly missing the camaraderie our women skillshares, we had a meetup last night which breathed new life into our efforts to get more women tinkering and fixing

The post Ada Lovelace Day reflections: encouraging women tinkerers and fixers appeared first on The Restart Project.

With six Restart Party hosts, in London, Leicester and Turin, we’ve been improving our online community space, designed to help demonstrate the impact of our community electronics repair. Nearly there!

The post Fixometer project report: creating an online community space appeared first on The Restart Project.

Despite the best efforts of legislators, regulators and law enforcement, in Europe, we continue to dispose of e-waste in the most inefficient and dangerous ways. Right here, in our own back garden. The solution is citizen-centred.

The post Why Europe fails to recycle e-waste and some solutions appeared first on The Restart Project.

Why do we need a sparring partner from the world of advertising? We need to get better at communicating to more people. And we think we are uniquely poised to help answer emerging questions for creative agencies' clients.

The post Required: agency “sparring partner” appeared first on The Restart Project.

We wrote a post last summer sharing our reading list, and there was loads of interest. So we thought we would share what we have stacked next to our bedside tables and loaded on our mobile devices, and ready for trips to the park and the pool.

The post Summer reading and listening list appeared first on The Restart Project.

While China increases capacity to manufacture ever more of the same kinds of products, is it stimulating internal consumption fast enough to compensate for our "meh" with the latest shiny gadget we are all supposed to buy?

The post A “bubble” stretching from provincial China to our high streets appeared first on The Restart Project.

This past weekend, we witnessed remotely forced and violent evictions occurring in a neighbourhood of Ghana's capital city Accra. Agbogbloshie is portrayed as the continent’s largest electrical wasteland; in truth it is a functional, profit-making recycling network.

The post Representations of e-waste globally matter appeared first on The Restart Project.

This week, we were really excited to deliver our first lesson remotely to a classroom in Chicago. Our lesson really provokes students to think about the material aspects of the internet and our digital culture. Students were very engaged.

The post Communicating the impact of our gadgets to students and young people appeared first on The Restart Project.

An amazing volunteer pool of Restarters has emerged from our monthly community events here in London. We had no idea there were so many talented people just waiting for an opportunity to share their skills.

The post Recognising the volunteer contributions of Restarters appeared first on The Restart Project.

We're proud to announce our first "residency" in a retailer - and not just any retailer - in Selfridges, an iconic London department store. The theme of their month of events is called "Work It" (not Work IT, although that might be appropriate for us!)

The post Restart in retail: “Working It” at Selfridges appeared first on The Restart Project.

This guest post is written by Jeannie Crowley, who we met at Mozfest. She is the Director of Technology at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, New York. She took the initiative of running the first school Restart Party, to fix decommissioned Chromebooks.

The post How to run a Restart Party at a school appeared first on The Restart Project.

When we go to the suburbs, in the UK, US, or Italy, our minds run wild. If we are truly going to turn things around, the suburbs are a huge part of a liveable future – not an after-thought. So we were very open minded - and excited! - when Havering Council approached us.

The post Essex calling: our pilot with London outer borough Havering appeared first on The Restart Project.

Aboubaker is a Restarter in Tunis who is an aircraft mechanic by day who got the "want-to-decipher-any-system" virus from his father. Read our interview with him to learn more about what makes him tick.

The post Restarter profile: Meet Aboubaker appeared first on The Restart Project.

In two years, we've seen +800 broken gadgets at our community events. Together with a team of volunteers and a coach, we have spent over 60 person-hours scouring the internet for data on their carbon footprints.

The post Fixometer project report: the environmental impact of e-stuff appeared first on The Restart Project.

People overwhelmingly value battery life over “thin”. Numerous studies have backed the idea that people want battery life more than any other “innovation”. So why do manufacturers seem to sideline this straight-forward desire in favour of "thin"?

The post Worn thin: the limits of a “logic of innovation” appeared first on The Restart Project.

About 55% of devices that come to our Restart Parties remain “unrepaired” – what to do? Sometimes our Restarters refer people to commercial repairers for help. But what to do if you would like to say goodbye to your device responsibly?

The post Status: unrepaired. Options for reusing and recycling electronics appeared first on The Restart Project.

Recently we've been talking with neighbour business 2052 Props about a reuse project - where we would pull parts from commonly failing electronics and repurpose them creatively into new products. For Pancake Day we took the heated bed from a 3D printer and made some pancakes.

The post 3D printer-salvage pancakes appeared first on The Restart Project.

The estimated manufacturing footprint of 80 million iPhone 6 projected to be sold (6,460 kilotonnes) will be greater than the total annual carbon footprint of the London boroughs of Westminster, Lambeth and Camden – of over 770,000 people and all of the business activity in three central areas of one of the world's richest cities.

The post The footprint of those iPhones appeared first on The Restart Project.

The “declutter” and “tiny house” trends are a consumerist purging. They run the risk of becoming transformed from ways of thinking to passive services and a pret-a-ocuper products. It is comparatively easy to throw or give away. It is harder to change our relationship with stuff.

The post Tiny houses, decluttering and late consumerist disorders appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our favourite fixes from a very memorable year… We can’t wait for more in 2015. Including a boombox, some vintage kit, self laptop-repair and screen replacements.

The post Top 5 fixes of 2014: Restart Party highlights appeared first on The Restart Project.

Earlier this year, Restarters and participants at a Restart Party in Camden shared why they love our events. Three UCL Material Cultures masters students facilitated, and talented photographer Heather Agyepong took these photos.

The post Reasons to fix and to support our community fixing appeared first on The Restart Project.

We won some recognition and funding! Votes of confidence from Nominet Trust, Unltd, WRAP and the London Sustainable Development Commission help our “upstart” message travel further.

The post Good news: awards and institutional support appeared first on The Restart Project.

Meet Philip, a Restarter who was a VSO volunteer after degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. Then he went on to work in IT. Now he's busy in his retirement volunteering and singing.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Philip appeared first on The Restart Project.

At a time when we hear incessant attacks on immigration, we see this country handing itself over to the single-most destructive, noxious event in American consumer culture: "Black Friday"

The post The UK adopts the single-most noxious event in American consumer culture appeared first on The Restart Project.

Restarter Faraz is a maker and hacker with a degree in Materials Science. He loves helping people, learning and solving puzzles, which is why he loves Restart Parties. Read more about what motivates him to fix

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Faraz appeared first on The Restart Project.

This is guest post by Steve Parkinson, co-founder of Teach Design, a group of Design and Technology teachers. He talks about the opportunities for collaboration with The Restart Project in the classroom.

The post Guest post: Restarting Design and Technology appeared first on The Restart Project.

In our Restart Party Kit, we offer some small tips and suggestions that might help other Restart Party hosts get started quicker. At the end of the day, throwing a Restart Party is not rocket science. Restart Party hosts are social people who make great things possible, one repair at a time.

The post Want to host a Restart Party? Please use our new kit appeared first on The Restart Project.

Ben is a Restarter, electronic engineering student and guitar guru who was "raised by a hippy in Brixton". He cares about reducing waste and explains here why he loves attending Restart Parties.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Ben appeared first on The Restart Project.

Our "residency" at City University this month was worthwhile as we reached students in need, and students who will spread our ethos. We had some really important learning that will inform how we work with universities going forward.

The post Restart at universities appeared first on The Restart Project.

Meet Dave! Restarter, parent, green ninja and "pentegenarian polymath with a penchant for poking around in things". He loves pink duct tape, among other things. Read more.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Dave appeared first on The Restart Project.

Meet Orsetta, a tinkerer, upcycler and Restarter who studied set design and interior design. She never wants to be separated from her all-purpose-tool and sewing kit. Read the full interview for more

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Orsetta appeared first on The Restart Project.

I woke up today and the HTC Desire I have been using since December - in its fourth year of service - flickered and then the screen went black. I'm time poor. What do I do?

The post Mobile on the blink: let’s treat our phones like we treat our bikes appeared first on The Restart Project.

David "Panda" Mery is our volunteer coordinator, and one of the most "iconic" Restarters with his orange braces. With a background in tech, he is an activist for more causes than one.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Panda appeared first on The Restart Project.

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day. At our Restart Party in a community space in Euston only a couple of miles from one of Lovelace's London residences, few participants knew who she was: one of the pioneers of computing.

The post Where are the women Restarters? Let’s get girls tinkering and fixing appeared first on The Restart Project.

This post is for you non-geeks. We promise. There are a number of things you can do before giving up on an old Android. We see these problems all of the time at Restart Parties.

The post 5 simple ways to save your good old Android appeared first on The Restart Project.

This is the first of a series of profiles of Restarters, our committed volunteers. Meet Ten, who loves tinkering, cycling, and hates waste in all its forms.

The post Restarter Profile: Meet Ten appeared first on The Restart Project.

We have run Restart Parties in universities before, but this project looks at helping to create a local team of Restarters. We are supported by the City University's Green Dragons.

The post This October: Join Restart At City University appeared first on The Restart Project.

People love to get their gadgets fixed. There is absolutely no doubt about it. But what we would like to more clearly demonstrate the environmental benefits to repairing.

The post Why we care about measurement – introducing our Fixometer concept appeared first on The Restart Project.

As a part of the London Design Festival, at the V&A Museum, we are prototyping a tool to show our environmental impact, in real time and in real life.

The post Digital Design Weekend at the V&A and prototyping our “Fixometer” appeared first on The Restart Project.

We talked at the Nesta Hot Topics session on how “open data” can help us use things for longer, and have a better idea of how they are recycled at end of life.

The post Open data for a truly circular economy appeared first on The Restart Project.

We spoke at the Indie Tech Summit in July. Our message: the same attention we dedicate to privacy, we need to dedicate to a more sustainable use of technology.

The post Sustainable design: focus on gadget longevity appeared first on The Restart Project.

You may recall, a year ago, we celebrated a "polar bear" worth of electronic waste prevented by our participants and volunteers. Now we're headed towards a ton of electronic waste, which would be more like a whole polar bear family!

The post Designing for more visible waste prevention appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’re in fundraising mode, in the final push of our bi-annual campaign. A total of 20 donors have generously contributed £902.50 – but we are still far shy of our £1500 goal.

The post Funding drive ends today: show your support appeared first on The Restart Project.

We hosted a very fast, two hour exploration of electronic waste at the Open Knowledge Festival. While we owe much of the growth of “Open Knowledge” to physical networks, hardware and electronics, we often ignore its material aspects and the consequences.

The post Exploring our e-waste: opening gadgets and learning about disposal appeared first on The Restart Project.

We are still young (and we still have plenty of mistakes to make), but we’re proud to say we’ve grown leaps and bounds from the time when we made our first run for office stationery a little over a year ago.

The post Our first official year – achievements and future steps appeared first on The Restart Project.

This post is by Brighton Repair Café co-founder Victoria Jackson. We started around the same time and we have so much in common.

The post Guest post: normalising repair and challenging “perceived obsolescence” appeared first on The Restart Project.

We need more than Youtube teardowns and iFixit guides to inspire us! It may seem like we are online all the time but we love a good book, a good long-read when we get the chance.

The post Summer reading list: books to inspire restarting appeared first on The Restart Project.

Thought experiment: Hollywood-apocalyptic male-fantasy scenarios aside, after a global catastrophe, how could a surviving 10% of us "restart" the world?

The post Survival as thought experiment: on resilience and restarting the world appeared first on The Restart Project.

During a visit to Beijing last month we had the opportunity to get a taste for the local repair and reuse culture. Here's what we saw and what we learned.

The post Repair and reuse in Beijing appeared first on The Restart Project.

Recently, we contributed to the Environmental Audit Committee’s ongoing inquiry on Growing a Circular Economy – our evidence follows below. Thanks to Lara Houston for her work on this document.

The post How to grow a circular economy appeared first on The Restart Project.

This is guest post by Restarter Philip Le Riche, who says "the most valuable asset if you want to fix things is an insatiable curiosity about how things work"

The post Guest post: Yes, you can fix it! appeared first on The Restart Project.

Apple is in PR blitz mode, promoting green initiatives. Yet there is nothing to suggest that Apple is addressing reduction of carbon emissions at manufacture, which according to their own data is the overwhelming majority.

The post Energy, emissions and our gadgets appeared first on The Restart Project.

Access Space is much more than a computer refurbishing centre: it is the first making space we visit that spells out inclusion as a key priority for its activities.

The post Visiting Access Space appeared first on The Restart Project.

Last week, our first women’s electronics repair workshop was a great success, thanks to the participation of 12 women of all ages and skill levels. We had an ex-professional repairer in our ranks, some born tinkerers and DIY types, and some who had never really had an opportunity to tinker. Our workshop is named after […]

The post Skillsharing workshops, for and by women appeared first on The Restart Project.

We visited the London Bike Kitchen - a very special DIY Bike Repair Workshop in east London. We had felt a certain kinship with this project for a long time. What is for "sale" is empowerment, community and resilience.

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Join us for the first ever global “hangout” for the grassroots, community fixing and repair movement, April 9. Community repair groups are flourishing all over the world. The number of fixit groups, Repair Cafés and Restart Parties has grown to the point that nobody has a real count of them! (The Restart Project maintains a […]

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Post originally published on the blog of Resource Conference, a free event on the circular economy. In conversations on the circular economy, especially related to electronics, we often feel that repair is little more than an afterthought. Yet, extending the lifespan of an existing device provides tangible benefits: it reduces waste management costs as well as […]

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This guest post is written by Restart Volunteer Coordinator David Mery. About a year ago, my sister in law got a free iPhone 5 from her network. She had no use for it, so she gave it to me. Recently I noticed a couple of problems: the top power switch is becoming harder to operate, […]

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This guest post is by Barcelona-based researcher Blanca Callén, who spent a week with The Restart Project. Read more about her ethnographic research on informal processing of electronic waste.

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We were delighted to help BBC Journalist LJ Rich fix her iPad last month, a saga which airs this weekend on BBC Click. Her story of over 8 hours of concentration, disappointment and suspense communicates how hard our sleek, beloved tablets are to repair.

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A journalist asked us the other day what our "best repairs" have been, and what makes us proudest about The Restart Project. The best repairs help participants lose their fear, or help volunteers realise how to help others.

The post Opening gadgets and transforming our reality appeared first on The Restart Project.

You are probably reading this because you spotted us on the telly. And you probably have a couple of questions: Who are you? The Restart Project is a charity, a group of technically-minded amateur repairers who share their skills, helping others learn how to use electronics longer. While our community events are free, the idea […]

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Last week, we launched our workplaces services with a special event in our home at Makerversity in Somerset House. In attendance were over 60 friends from the private sector working in sustainability and human resources, allies from academic institutions, think-tanks and museums, journalists and a number of people working in technology. There was real interest, […]

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We had an amazing year in 2013. Our Restart Parties have inspired people to host their own, from Florida, to Italy to Tunisia and across the city here in London. With this proliferation of Restart Parties, we have learned quickly what kinds of support people need to throw their own. We are working on a […]

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So hard to choose our favourite fixes of the year, after seeing hundreds of devices and working with their owners! We picked these together with our volunteer Restarters because they each have something to tell us about how we can revive electronics repair, and be more resilient, together.

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From now, we'd like to offer more immediate support, especially to people who have simple problems that seem fatal. If you use Twitter and Facebook, you can get our instant support by using the hashtag #SOSRestart.

The post Emergency support when gadgets fail appeared first on The Restart Project.

Just about this time of year, we are bombarded with even MORE messages to consume. The emotional blackmail underlying these messages is shocking. We are made to believe that the only way to show love for our family and friends is to give them newer things. Instead of going blue in the face complaining about […]

The post Throwing a spanner in the consumerist Christmas appeared first on The Restart Project.

This post was originally published in Electronics Weekly in our new series called Unscrewed. No doubt about it, tablets and mobiles are getting thinner and harder to open. More parts are glued, fused and soldered together, all in the pursuit of these sleek sealed gadgets. We’re reminded of an anecdote about the late Steve Jobs, […]

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People who love the idea of Restart Parties are helping to spread them from our original communities of Brixton and Camden. We’re quite thrilled to see the results of our September “Start your own Restart Party” workshop. Community repair is catching! This month in London, two new events inspired by our Restart Parties will happen […]

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We were privileged to get a slot at TEDx Brixton in July and we thought we would try to say something that has been on our minds for a while. The global conversation for sustainability in manufacturing is shifting to the “circular economy”, like at Davos, where the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has promoted the concept […]

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At The Restart Project, our favourite – and surprisingly uncommon – message is: We were amused to have dozens of friends and supporters sending us the Phonebloks video a few weeks ago. It is a very compelling concept for a modular, upgradeable mobile phone – inspired by Legos and very well communicated. It is a […]

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This post was first published as a guest post on the Fairphone blog. Two weeks ago we ran a workshop in the Fairphone Pop-Up Shop as part of London Design Festival. We were invited to create a participatory event built around the latest prototype of the Fairphone, the first smartphone designed and produced with transparency […]

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It looks like it’s business as usual for mobile manufacturers, providers and “enthusiasts”. In the past few days, we have once again witnessed a typical set of events: first of all, new versions of an iconic smartphone get unveiled, followed by an extraordinary round of hype and media attention – like there is no tomorrow, […]

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We’ve got an interesting couple of events planned for coming weeks, beyond the usual frenzy of activity of Restart Parties from Dalston to rural Wales, and our workshop to help others replicate our model. We’re partnering with Fairphone at London Design Festival (September 19) and some friends to run some fun sessions at Mozilla Festival […]

The post Beyond fixing: taking apart and tinkering appeared first on The Restart Project.

You have contacted us from all over the UK and well beyond. Some of you have plenty of repair skills you want to share. Others love the concept and would like to see it happening nearby. We have created a list of initial guidelines to help you run your event, but we know sometimes a […]

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We see a danger of the multiplication of disposable, use once and throw-away gadgets, treating electronics-intensive projects like sand castles. As one-offs, where everything will end up in the scrap-heap - only the scrap-heap does not wash away.

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This week the Transition Network‘s Reconomy Project featured us along with 19 other fantastic projects in their newly published report: “The New Economy in 20 Enterprises”. We were delighted to be selected among such inspiring innovators striving to invent new meaningful local economies: reskilling and creating jobs in our communities, while developing much needed services […]

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This week we participated in the first of three workshops organised by the People’s Design Lab. It was an opportunity to learn from others with a background in design about their frustrations with printing. Interestingly, initial conversations revolved around a deeper question: why should we print at all? Why is it that certain airlines and […]

The post Redesigning the inkjet printer – work in progress appeared first on The Restart Project.

Just a quick post to thank people for all of the messages of support, donations and other morale boosts we have received over recent weeks. Especially since the excellent BBC Tech coverage, which was really important for us! (We’re still having trouble responding personally to all, so please bear with us.) We’ve received kind messages […]

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On many occasions, the meticulous work of our wonderful Restarters has helped to clean, repair, defeat planned obsolescence and give a second life to printers that were just about ready to be taken to a recycling centre.

The post Let’s rethink and Restart the inkjet printer appeared first on The Restart Project.

We need to help mobilise a global network of Restarters, and we need your help to achieve this. We have worked tirelessly alongside our dayjobs and degrees to give life to The Restart Project because we believe it is important and urgent and it simply has to happen. With your help, we can spread Restart […]

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We’re celebrating our first birthday today with friends and supporters. We have to pinch ourselves when we realise that we have thrown 27 Restart Parties in the past year, involving and empowering over 500 Londoners of all ages, backgrounds and groups. Together we have saved an approximate 393 kilograms of electronics from waste, which James […]

The post One year, one electronic polar bear appeared first on The Restart Project.

In April, I saw an old friend at the Reclaiming Repair workshop in Paris. After years in quite separate directions, Amanda and I marveled at how our projects are related. Hers: a hackable and repairable lamp. Small projects like this help us envision a different future, where we take back ownership of domestic electricals like […]

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As soon as you enter the headquarters of Millor Que Nou (which in Catalan means “Better Than New”), it immediately feels like people in Barcelona are well ahead of the curve when it comes to repairing and skill sharing. This project started in 2009 and provides three main services: a monthly programme of repair training […]

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We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been chosen to receive proceeds from the online auction connected to the launch of the Ebay and Patagonia Common Threads partnership in the UK in the UK. Common Threads is more than just an online storefront/collaboration between Ebay and Patagonia. It is an initiative that aims to boldly change […]

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This post appeared first as a guest post on the RSA’s The Great Recovery blog. Ten months into our activity, we have stopped more than once to pinch ourselves. Last year, when we started throwing Restart Parties, we only had the smallest group of volunteers. We just threw ourselves head long into our cause – […]

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Last weekend we took part in UP London’s Hackathon at Imperial College, focused on the theme of resilience in urban environments. It was a great opportunity for us to start working on our future platform, connecting amateur and professional repairers with people in need of repairing the broken things in their lives. The idea is to […]

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This Friday, we will pitch our platform to the Urban Prototyping Hackathon at Imperial College. The themes of the UPLondon Festival really resonate with The Restart Project: sustainability, the city and entrepreneurship. The platform we are proposing is at the intersection of all three themes – our aim is to create a space for the […]

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AFP produced this video piece on The Restart Project, including interviews with Ugo and Janet, and starring some of our favourite Restarters. Please let us know if you spot this on TV, we are not big TV watchers!

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We had a fun, blustery day at Brixton Market – our first – on Easter Saturday. We have been keen to pop-up in a market, to promote repair “elsewhere”. Our idea is not to take business away from local repairers, but instead to encourage people to repair and reuse in a place where they are […]

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As of Monday we are an official legal entity! For the past nine months, we were an informal project running on fire-in-the-belly, one small grant, good will and lots of help from our friends. While we have trouble categorising ourselves – we called ourselves “Project” for a reason, we have a social project which we […]

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We had our first, more formal training this week, at the invite of Brent Libraries. Our Restarters worked with 10 people who had signed up for our "Speed Up Your Laptop" training. None wanted to give up on their laptops, but really did feel they needed some basic maintenance skills.

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We had an excellent day yesterday at Central Saint Martins, one of the University of the Arts London campuses, most associated with product design. We started the day with a lecture to second year students about what we have learned working with hundreds of frustrated electronics owners over the past nine months. Our top 4 […]

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UPDATE: see the results of our online “therapy” at the end of this post! Have you ever brought home a new gadget which you had high expectations for, and it then broke your heart? Or did your favourite, 10 year old pair of headphones finally die on you, leaving you bereft? Or perhaps you tried […]

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Since we got started, we have been interested in bringing repair back into public spaces and getting people engaged in a hands-on way. This post is about how we arrived at one of our most exciting concepts. Last year, we participated in OpenIDEO’s E-Waste Challenge which asked the question: How can we manage e-waste & […]

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We had a great time fixing in the midst of a Good For Nothing event on Saturday. It was one of the first times we were repairing in the middle of another event – the Good For Nothing network of creatives, strategists and developers was at the Forward Foundation helping three very worthy youth organisations […]

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And the winner is… It might appear as cheating that we decided to pick the case of the infamous Epson Stylus D68, which we already wrote about back in December as our symbolic top fix so far. In short, it’s the story of a printer which stopped functioning all of a sudden, leaving the owner with […]

The post Our Top Fixes of 2012: #1 – Epson, We Have a Problem! appeared first on The Restart Project.

Laurence came to our first Restart Party in Brixton, the one we defined as our “Midas moment”, as everything we touched…miraculously got fixed. Laurence’s Matsui 225 dvd player was no exception to the rule: when she brought it to the event, it was a typical case of a sad piece of electronics on its way […]

The post Our Top Fixes of 2012: #2 – Repair and Reuse Before Recycling appeared first on The Restart Project.

Barti brought her MacBook Pro with a “dead screen” to a Restart Party. We troubleshooted her computer and figured that the problem was actually with the video card: the laptop would switch on normally, with the familiar Mac OS X start-up sound, while screen was completely black, not even marginally dim (which is what usually […]

The post Our Top Fixes of 2012: #3 – Beware of the “Genius” appeared first on The Restart Project.

A whole lot of dust inside a 6-year-old Macbook! Janet’s laptop has been a source of inspiration for The Restart Project. Months before planning the first event, we were already “restarting” her old white MacBook, by adding additional RAM, updating some applications and clearing space from the hard drive, in order to speed it up. […]

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We held our first Restart Party back in June 2012, and in exactly 6 months we went on to run 12 events and countless presentations all over London. Our growing community of self-repair enthusiasts has fixed, or contributed to fix, all kinds of malfunctioning electronics: from laptops to electric shavers, from printers to bed-side lamps, […]

The post Our Top Fixes of 2012: #5 Not All Manufacturers Are Equally Greedy appeared first on The Restart Project.

We are looking for a working space in Camden or Brixton (or in between) for 2013 – we would ideally prefer a year-long lease but would be interested in a minimum of six months. (Since we pop-up for our events, the last thing we need is to be changing our office every couple of months.) […]

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Why not give the gift of a simple promise to help a friend or loved one repair something in 2013? You could either include this in a Christmas card, or present it with a gift as a “personal warranty” for the gift, or you could fold up and drop in a stocking. We’ll be handing […]

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I am not a technical person. It may seem strange, being one of the founders of this project, but perhaps that is always what makes me good for this. The technical stuff not only frustrates me – it also really intimidates me, just like most people. When I first saw The Lightbulb Conspiracy, a documentary […]

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From London, we have been inspired by Holland, the US, Australia, Brazil, and now we realise that there are many more community repair and fixit groups than we ever knew of before… Milan, Barcelona, Finland, the list just grows. We decided the time has come to visualise this growing movement of repair! Mapping repair groups […]

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Wow, time flies, we look at the calendar and we will have had over a dozen Restart Parties in our six short months of life. We’ve learned tons and met so many great people. And we’ve had so many “hallelujah” moments – like this one, in our very first Restart Party: We have three events […]

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Mozilla Festival, beyond being fun, was most important for us because it really pushed us to think about the “how” – how do we build momentum towards our ambitious goal of changing relationships to electronics? If there is one thing we’ve learned working over ten years in global development, it’s “how matters”. Ugo and I […]

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At an event where rapid innovation (“fuck it, ship it”) is the central driving force, questions about green credentials could be deemed a buzzkill – but surely an eye for sustainability tradeoffs could become one of the many “ninjaskills” of the future?

The post #Mozfest pt 1: The politics of making the future appeared first on The Restart Project.

We’ve been enjoying some welcome media hits (but not yet from here in the UK aside from an early interview with BBC’s Outriders). The media interest from southern Europe is not a surprise to us – given the deep and unrelenting crisis the region is going through. Restart itself is a response to what we […]

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We were obviously happy to be chosen as semi-finalists in the Nesta Waste Reduction Challenge Prize. We are in the running for £10,000 to test out some of our best ideas in 2013, with a potential prize “jackpot” of £50,000. But one immediate benefit of being shortlisted was spending Wednesday with some inspiring and friendly […]

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We had a great turnout at Swiss Cottage Library – the foyer was an excellent space for a Restart Party, we hope to pop-up there again. Thanks to everybody for getting really involved in the repairs, for rolling up your sleeves. Our repair roll from Brixton was hard to maintain – we had some really […]

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