Repair cafes are pop-up events where people can bring stuff to be repaired, and to learn skills. Photo / 123rf
Repair cafes are pop-up events where people can bring stuff to be repaired, and to learn skills. Photo / 123rf
Opinion by Diana Clement
Diana Clement is a freelance journalist who has written a column for the Herald since 2004. Before that, she was personal finance editor for the Sunday Business (now The Business) newspaper in London.
When did you last replace something without checking if it could be repaired? I have to admit to being guilty of that from time to time.
Every week, month or year we can put off replacing existing appliances and other belongings, the more money we free up for otherpurposes. Manufacturers don’t make that easy.
It’s not just electrical appliances. I’ve repaired my heavy-duty double punch twice now, having assumed the first time it fell to bits that I was up for an expensive replacement.
People throw clothing out because they don’t know how to sew a button on or repair a seam, says Brigitte Sistig, co-founder of Repair Cafe Aotearoa New Zealand. Repair cafes are pop-up events where people can bring stuff to be repaired, and to learn skills. Volunteers can try to fix anything small enough to be brought in, such as electrical items, phones, bicycles, ornaments and much more.
The volunteers endeavour to educate people on how to do it themselves next time. “It’s an educational tool as well as community resilience,” says Sistig. “For example, a lot of sewing jobs get brought in, and we teach people to sew.”
Clothes can be taken to a repair cafe for mending.
New Zealanders grew up repairing everything from clothes to toasters, says Sistig. “We bought quality products and we learned how to repair them.”
Responsibility for today’s throw-it-away mentality sits with manufacturers who want us to buy replacements, she says. Or they make a killing out of selling spare parts‚ to the point where it’s not financially viable for us to repair.
“The product is designed these days so that it needs to become waste in [a short] timeframe. It’s planned obsolescence. You get a two-year warranty, and then you buy a [replacement]. We really need to have mandatory product stewardship and a complete rethink on what we take from the Earth and how we look after it.”
That’s where repair cafés, community bike hubs and the internet, come in. Even if you weren’t born with an engineering gene, it is amazing how helpful Google and YouTube can be when it comes to DIY repairs. If you need advice from other human beings, there are fixit chat groups on the internet. Sistig recommends Ifixit.com, which has thriving community forums.
Google can also help find companies that repair items. When I shopped around for a phone screen replacement, the cost varied from $160 to $250. At $160 it was worth repairing.
Andrew Yoa, who volunteers at the City Centre Library Repair Cafe in Auckland, says it may only take 10 minutes to repair an appliance but a customer might be charged $100 on a $200 item if they took it to a commercial repairer.
The registered electrician, who volunteers at the repair cafe in his spare time, sees lamps where all that is wrong is the electrical cables have come loose inside. It takes him 5 to 10 minutes to repair. If the customer had to pay for the repair, the item would most likely end up in the landfill.
Yoa also sees examples where manufacturers make repairs tricky to do. When one person brought in a Living & Co stick vacuum cleaner recently, it proved very difficult to open. Once it was open, Yoa became aware that it had 12 non-standard batteries in it that needed replacing. The customer managed to track down where to order the batteries from. But it wasn’t easy.
The repair cafes and other organisations are lobbying for “right to repair” measures to be legislated for. A survey by Consumer NZ in 2020 of 5000 New Zealanders found that 76 per cent of participants would prefer to have products repaired than throw them out.
I fall into that camp, and was horrified when I found that Simpson/Electrolux no longer sold the part to hold my dryer filter in place. I’m expected to ditch the machine for such a simple repair - although I’ve cobbled together a DIY replacement part.
The right-to-repair campaign calls for laws that require products to last longer and be easier to repair, as well as other measures including requiring producers to offer spare parts.
*Readers in Auckland are in for a repair treat in September. The Repair Cafe has four extra events in Ponsonby, Birkenhead, New Lynn and Manurewa to coincide with the Auckland Climate Festival. www.aucklandclimatefestival.co.nz
