The lost art of repair

There was a time, not so very long ago, when a broken object was the beginning of a task rather than the end of its life. Shoes were resoled, radios were taken to the local electrician and torn clothes were patched at the kitchen table. Today, for a great many households, the instinctive response to a cracked screen or a dead washing machine is to replace it. It is tempting to explain this shift purely in terms of price — new goods have become cheap, while skilled labour has become expensive — but I believe that explanation, while partly true, misses something important about how our relationship with objects has changed.

Consider first the design of the things we buy. Many modern devices are sealed with glue rather than screws, their batteries cannot be removed without specialist tools, and spare parts are either unavailable or sold only to authorised technicians. Manufacturers defend these choices on the grounds that they make products thinner, lighter and more resistant to water, and in fairness, these are qualities that consumers genuinely value. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that making repair difficult also suits a business model that depends on regular replacement. Whether or not this is deliberate, the effect is the same: the owner of a product is gradually transformed into someone who merely uses it.

The environmental cost of this transformation is considerable. Electronic waste is one of the fastest-growing categories of rubbish in the world, and only a modest fraction of it is properly recycled. More significantly, much of the environmental damage caused by a smartphone or laptop occurs before it ever reaches the consumer, during the mining of raw materials and the energy-intensive process of manufacture. Recycling, however efficient, recovers only some of this. Extending the life of a device by even a year or two is therefore, in my view, a far more effective environmental measure than any recycling scheme, and it deserves considerably more attention from policymakers than it currently receives.

There are encouraging signs that this is beginning to happen. In several countries, so-called right-to-repair laws now require manufacturers to make spare parts and repair manuals available for certain products, such as household appliances, for a fixed number of years after sale. Critics argue that such rules will raise prices and slow innovation. I am not persuaded by this. Similar warnings were made when safety and energy-efficiency standards were first introduced, and in most cases manufacturers adapted without great difficulty. Some have even discovered that a reputation for durability can be a selling point in its own right.

Legislation alone, however, will not restore a culture of repair. Skills that are not used are soon lost, and in many places the small repair shops that once occupied every high street have closed. Here, the growth of community repair cafés is worth noting. At these informal events, volunteers with practical skills help members of the public fix broken items, from toasters to bicycles, free of charge. The number of objects saved from landfill at any single event is small, and it would be foolish to pretend that repair cafés can solve the problem of waste on their own. Their real value, I would argue, lies elsewhere: in showing people that the inside of a machine is not a mystery, and that fixing something is often easier than they imagined.

Indeed, the psychological rewards of repair are frequently overlooked. The sociologist Martin Hale, who has spent several years observing repair cafés, describes the moment when a visitor's broken lamp lights up again as one of “quiet triumph”. People who repair their possessions, he suggests, tend to develop a stronger attachment to them and are less inclined to replace them on a whim. I find this entirely plausible. An object that we have opened, understood and mended becomes, in a small way, our own creation.

None of this means that everyone should become an amateur engineer, or that every broken item is worth saving. Some repairs are genuinely uneconomic, and some older appliances use so much energy that replacing them with efficient modern models is the better choice. The aim should not be to repair everything, but to make repair a real option rather than an impossible one. At present, for too many products and too many people, it is not. Changing that will require effort from manufacturers, governments and consumers alike — but the alternative, a world in which we own nothing that we are able to fix, seems to me a poor bargain.