Share and Repair
Recycling is something we’ve learnt to do as part of our weekly routine. Share and Repair are helping us go much further. In the six years that I’ve known them they have never stopped innovating and pushing forward.
Lorna Montgomery
Our mission is to inspire a change in behaviour in society. To reduce waste and carbon through practical action: repair, reuse, repurpose.
We're still a young movement. We’re still learning. At the moment we have about 170 volunteers, soon to be 200.
It started with a kettle. Mine broke and I decided to get it repaired. I asked my neighbour, David, who said ‘If only I had a small tool, I could do this.’ That’s when I realised there must be people out there, who have tools and skills that are not being used. I did some research and discovered repair cafes which were started in the Netherlands about 14 years ago. I was so excited to find a template we could follow.
Repairing
Nowadays, if something breaks, we throw it away and replace it. This is not sustainable. There aren’t enough resources in the world to keep making and scrapping things. To continue doing this, we would need three planets … but we only have one.
I advertised for repairers and others interested in getting involved. We met in a pub in Bath. Five repairers from that first meeting are still working with us six years later.
At a repair cafe, people bring broken items and our repairers fix them if they can, in return for a donation to our costs. We will repair anything – sewing, mechanical, electrical, whatever. The joy of getting something repaired is extraordinary. I know this personally, because I took a broken battery pack to a repairer. He took it apart, soldered something, put it back together and it worked. It was amazing. It's great to see other people sharing that delight. People even feel happy if they are told their item can't be mended. That means they can throw it away with a clear conscience.
Our repair cafes happen in various places on Saturday morning from 10am to 1pm once a month. Over the years we have added more and more locations. We have a repair cafe in Larkhall, Southdown, Weston, Peasedown, High Littleton, Farnborough, Bradford on Avon every month and we are now introducing Corsham and Bear Flat as well.
The cafes also have a social role. They have always been really happy places. They are great for intergenerational chitchat. You can have children, parents, older people, who all end up talking about recipes and mending and all sorts of things. It's a very equal platform, where people come together who might never normally meet.
People coming to the repair cafe sometimes wonder why we ask questions about the make, model and cost of the items. It's really important for impact measurement. We can look for patterns in what is repairable or not and what savings are made.
Sometimes it would cost a lot to get a part for something that needs to be repaired; but the point is you don't have to make the rest of the item. I can understand people not wanting to buy new parts for something that's going to be obsolete. But if it's a mechanical item with a motor that is, for example, just going to mow your lawn, how many ways are there to cut grass? And you don't have to make the handle. You don't have to make the wheels. Repair it.
Sharing
We all own too much stuff that we hoard and use only occasionally.
We needed a sharing facility, where people could borrow items. To start with we used a cupboard in the Weston hub, where we have our Weston repair cafes. We added shelving. We bought the one thing that people are used to borrowing – a carpet cleaner, and collected about 50 other items. But even then, people couldn't see what we had. We did advertise them on the website but the concept was still very new to the public.
That continued until I acquired a four months’ lease on a shop in Broad Street, Bath from BANES Council. We were due to open in March 2020 but didn’t because of COVID. Obviously, we couldn’t use it much at all during our four months so I asked if we could have it for a year. They said ‘yes but if somebody wants to rent it, you have to get out’. So, we had a longer lease, but always with that insecurity.
After six months we did have to move but the Council found us another shop, the one that we’re in now on George Street (3 York Buildings, George Street, BA1 2EB). It has three floors, so we've got storage, the operational shop floor, the repair section and additional space for running other projects.
Now we can display our Library of Things and even have some on show in the shop window. We have over 400 items available to borrow.
How to…
As well as repairing items, we need to empower people to do more themselves.
Someone came into a repair cafe, looked at the sewing machine and watched Jackie useing it. She said, ‘I have one of those but I can't work it’. We said: ‘Bring it along and we'll show you how.’ That was the birth of our ‘How to’ workshops: ‘How to use a sewing machine’.
Then we thought about bikes. We didn't want to do bike repairs because there are people doing repairs as a business. But we do offer ‘How to maintain your bike / skateboard / scooter’. Maintaining them gives them a longer life.
Our Library of Things includes a lot of tools. So, we introduced ‘How to use hand and power tools’.
Home kit
Setting up a new home on a low income is a struggle.
There is an organisation in Bristol called Home Bank that runs alongside the food bank and hands out household goods. We wanted to do something similar. We advertised for small electricals that we could repair and PAT test (electrical safety test) and give out to low-income families. We send a spreadsheet showing the items we have available every week to a bank of charities. They decide who might need what and they collect it or we deliver it.
Measuring
Of course, we need to measure what impact we are having.
The database we use is something called the Fixometer, part of the Restart project. Restart is a global network of repairers, that campaigns for the right to repair i.e., for manufacturers to design their products to be repairable. It also provides a platform for repairers who can share information about repairing. The Fixometer is a tool that collects information on items repaired (or not). It calculates how much waste and carbon dioxide emissions have been prevented by repairing the items.
We are beginning to feed back to people these calculations so that they can see what has been achieved. A screen in the shop will display the information. And each repair cafe will feed back to their local community.
Reaching out to school children
We've developed activities for primary school children on how and why we must reduce waste.
School groups come into the shop and they look at the Library of Things. Then they are given a card that says: ‘Eva's going camping’, or ‘this couple are having a party’ or ‘these people are going to renovate their kitchen’. We ask what items from the Library of Things could they use? They choose three items. We tell them the cost of buying those items new and they work out the savings. We talk to them about where things come from and where things go and the linear way that we live. Then they come upstairs to the repairers and they mend a vacuum cleaner.
We go into a school and the children have a session on the circular economy. They make up laws that companies should follow. They repair a torch.
We talk to them about the journey of a computer tablet. Where do the tablets come from? It's not Amazon. We begin with having to dig the raw materials out of the ground and then we take them on a little truck and on a boat to show the journey of all the items inside the tablet.
The children feedback what they’ve learned to the rest of the school at an assembly and then we show them our animated film.
What next?
I sense we are at a point now where people are ready to do more. We want to be a catalyst for action, to get people to think about their lifestyle.
So, we’ll be telling people about one of the carbon footprint websites. Probably WWF or GIKI. On the site, they have to answer questions about their transport, food, all that sort of stuff and it gives them a score. It then suggests areas where they could choose to focus their effort to reduce their own carbon footprint.
We want to have a laptop in the shop and at each repair cafe, where people could look at the carbon footprint website and see how it works, and then they would hopefully go home and follow it up.
There are some easy wins to reduce waste. For example, if everyone would keep their tech for at least one year longer before replacing it, that would make a huge difference.
Our next big ‘How to…’ is how to reduce energy use at home. Linking in with the other organisations who already offer advice in this area, such as Transition Bath and the Centre for Sustainable Energy, is really key. We have a thermal imaging camera in the shop for hire. We want people who hire it to know how to use it and how to interpret the results. We are trying to create a platform for people to come and understand and learn.
It's part of the whole green economy. We must look at how to train people and how to make an economic model for repairing items. At the moment shops want £25 to £75 just to look at a broken thing, never mind repair it. People are not going to take the risk. So, maybe we can act as a triage, where if we can’t repair it, we can advise on where to go for a more complicated repair.
Some repairs are so simple that it wouldn't be necessary. Those are the real wins.
March 2023
Share and Repair website is at shareandrepair.org.uk