Extending the lifetime of all washing machines, notebooks, vacuum cleaners and smartphones in the EU by just one year would save around 4 MtCO2 annually by 2030, the equivalent of taking over 2 million cars off the roads.
This calculation, contained in a new report from the European Environmental Bureau, highlights one of the reasons I have spent weekends and evenings helping other people fix their broken possessions for the past seven years. Our London-based group The Restart Project is proud to be a part of a global grassroots movement — the community repair movement.
Grassroots and global movement
Around the world thousands of groups come together at community venues to fix a never-ending flow of prematurely broken products, from kettles to laptops and paper shredders. It's not so remarkable that we are all doing the same activity, but that we all work with the same ethos. We are not creating free repair shops, instead we are hosting transformative learning events that contribute to social cohesion.
