Repair Cafe: Can We Fix It?

The worst case of planned obsolescence I have heard of concerns computer printers that have a "pre-programmed failure date" that shuts the device down after so many copies, or when a competitors ink cartridge is used.

Worst case, that is, until hearing that a popular cell phone company intentionally slowed their old phones down so that people would think they needed a new handset. Many people replaced their phones not knowing that all they needed was a new battery.

There is a rising swell of people that are sick and tired of the intentional throw-away economy. They want quality things that can be repaired, and that will last a long time.

A proactive response to all the cheap, made-to-fail crap is The Repair Café. Its objectives are to reduce waste, maintain repair skills, and strengthen social cohesion.

It was initiated by Martine Postma when she organized the first Repair Café in Amsterdam, on October 18, 2009. Fast forward to today, and there are over 1500 repair cafes around the world.

The following is from the Repair Cafe International website:

Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need, on clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. 

You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields. 

Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. 

If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. 

You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY.

Any time something breaks, the first question should be, "Can we fix it?" Too often companies do not sell replacement parts, or give owners access to repair manuals, making repairs difficult.

The Right To Repair Movement is actively taking on this form of forced obsolescence, and demanding that rules change so that owners can fix the things they have paid for without corporate malfeasance.

Repair Cafes encourage people to "Fix It" before carelessly throwing out and buying new replacements. Not repairing when we can means perpetuating the cycle of disposability while supporting unscrupulous manufacturers.

Is there a Repair Cafe near you. Check the map here.

Or perhaps you would like to initiate a Repair Cafe in your own community. See here.

Welcome to the Repair Revolution. Fix it, don't nix it.

10,000 Year Plan

"Our long term plan is like our short term plan, only longer."

Humanity should think about developing a plan longer than the next election cycle. We don't need 5 year plans, we need 5,000 year plans. Preferably two of them.

A solid 10,000 year plan would go a long way toward figuring out where we want to go with this petri dish known as Earth. I love the idea of thinking ahead 7 generations, but how about extending that to 500? Supposedly we are the smartest creatures on Earth (and the known Universe according to some), so we should be able to get our big brains together and do this thing.

In order to reduce the chance of repeating the thousands of years of blind bumbling that we have been experiencing so far, we should come up with an overall plan for humans (and everything else) on our shared petri-planet home. Surely, considering the importance of my proposal, we can get some consensus towards a set of common goals and outcomes.

Like survival at first, looking at our increasingly grim short term prospects.

Then we can proceed from there and start planning for things like ridding the environment of human-created radiation produced during our misguided experiment with nuclear energy. That alone is a project that will take thousands of years. We should have one of those already, shouldn't we?

Next in The Big Plan we can look out over the next few hundred years. Where do we see ourselves as a species? What do we want to achieve in this time? I for one would like to see something more substantial than the planet's first trillionare.

A lot can happen in one year, let alone a hundred or a thousand. We should have a plan to help direct where we are going. Many of us can imagine a better world, and if we can imagine it, we can achieve it. We can put it in the plan.

As an ex-teacher I know the importance and the challenges of planning. It will take a different way of thinking to extend our imaginations past the next election, or our own brief existence. But we do care about our kids, don't we? And their kids? And theirs? And so on all the way up the line?

We have already had many thousands of years to get this thing right, and it feels like we aren't quite there yet. Let's get The Big Plan started.

How do you see humanity developing over 10,000 years? The glorious possibilities are endless.

These Boots Lasted, But They're Done

Good bye old friends.

In 2010 I did a post about making my old boots last. At that time they had logged 22 years of faithful service. Then I used them for five more years. Now I am going to start making a new pair last. They probably will be my last.

I try to make my possessions last as long as possible.  It is part of my anti-planned obsolescence, anti-upgrade, anti-progress-for-the-sake-of-progress crusade. Or put another way, my pro-make it last plan.

A case in point would be my leather hiking boots. In the 27 years I used them they passed over thousands of kilometres of this beautiful Earth, ranging from mountain tops to endless sandy beaches.

My new boots were a steal of a deal in 2004. But I wasn't done with my old ones yet - they were only 16 years old at the time. Just getting started.

Hello new friends.

However, I knew that I would eventually need new boots, and have been carrying the new ones, waiting for the time me and my old boots could agree on a retirement date. Now, with separating flattened soles and wrecked rands, we agreed the time has come.

Enter the newly treated brand new-ish pair.

If these boots last as long as the old ones, I will be an 80 year old dude snowshoeing through the woods, my "new" boots as weathered as I am. There is a goal to work toward. It starts tomorrow - the snow is great.

Pillowy, powder prevails in the back yard woods.

Disposable World

Global garbage production is on the rise partly due to there being a shorter life cycle for products. This shorter life cycle (aided by planned obsolescence) is more profitable for manufacturers, but more detrimental to our pocket books and the natural world.

From disposable cutlery to computer printers with self-destruct chips that engage after a preset number of prints, to frequent upgrades that make previous models unwanted, we have been living a disposable lifestyle that has been creating mountains of waste.

The apparent convenience of disposable stuff is harmful as it hides unintended consequences - solving one problem creates a host of new ones. Convenience now often turns out to be terribly inconvenient later.

As long as our brainwashing leads us to believe that such flagrant waste is acceptable, we will be reluctant to choose more sustainable practices.

Disposable stuff, disposable lives, disposable world VS quality stuff, quality lives, quality world. We decide.

It can be as easy as just washing the spoon when you are done with it.

Pyramids of Waste: Planned Obsolescence

- Victor Lebow, 20th century economist writing on consumer capitalism

 My "Make It Last: Appliances/Electronics" post hit a chord with NBA readers. Comments spoke of iPhones that terminate before their service contract, and big screen televisions that permanently end the programming day before the 'dated' TVs they replaced.

Many are lamenting the short life of some consumer products because it appears that manufactures are only interested in 'make it last - for a while'. What is a person to do? How do we fight back?

In Pyramids of Waste, a worthy documentary recommended by NBA reader Nicole, a man takes his broken printer to several computer shops. Each shop tells him the same, irritating thing - "It could be repaired, but it will cost less to buy a new one."

Welcome to the nightmarish world of planned obsolescence, a wasteful practice popularized at the beginning of the consumer age in the 1950s. By 1960, Vance Packard said it was "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals."

Its other purpose? To increase corporate profits through having consumers replace products at regular, frequent intervals.

How do you induce consumers to replace products? Either engineer consumer items to self-destruct prematurely, or design newer, shinier, zestier versions so that consumers will replace older models that are 'dated', but perfectly usable.

In the self-destruct category is the infamously fickle computer printer. They are darn near free to buy, astronomically expensive to maintain, and often artificially limited to a set number of prints. Eventually they find their way, illegally, to African and Asian nations for disposal.

In my own brush with 'shortened replacement cycles', a well-meaning friend gave us a brand new computer printer. We never should have let it cross our threshold. The ink cartridges it came with soon did not work, and error messages indicated they needed replacing. We thought that premature, but hey, the thing was actually free.

Of course the replacement ink cartridges cost more than the printer itself - we could see how the scam works. When the new cartridges quit printing far too quickly we cut our losses, raised the Earth flag, and said, "No more!". We gave the printer away, and never replaced it.

On the rare occasion we need to print something we just go to the public library and do it there for fifteen cents a print. Life is short, and we don't need the grief you purchase along with a printer.

Pyramids of Waste, after identifying the problems of planned obsolescence, highlights a few individuals that are doing something about it. There are ways of working around kill switches, and DIYers are re-introducing 'Repair' back into the environmental R's of refuse, reuse, repair, and recycle.

There is also the NBA way, which is avoiding the products altogether, or getting good products to start with, then make them last. Thankfully there were also many comments on the Appliances/Electronics post from readers that are following this approach.

By living without, or by getting quality and making it last, and by learning to repair items, we are beating the 'waste by design' system.

An item isn't 'dated' until it is worn or broken beyond repair, and damn the stainless steel, sleek modern design meant to entice us. We here at NBA are refusing to be made into "wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals."