The Restart Project Blog

This post originally appeared on “Fix It Workshop“, the blog of Matt Marchant, who repairs in his home workshop in Worthing, in the UK.

While we haven’t been able to repair together, we’re hard at work on a new project to explore our repair data and our environmental impact.

In time for half-term here in the UK, we’re launching an online experience for 8-12 year olds (and anybody older too!)

What a tumultuous start to this year!

Today we’re launching a campaign in London to mobilise donations of laptops, cash, and contributions of volunteers’ skills so that unused laptops can be transformed into laptops for students and people in need.

Here’s a story of a simple DIY repair that nearly did not happen.

Over a year after its inquiry started, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) released its report on electronic waste.

This year, having access to functioning technology has become more important than ever.

“Repair is Essential” – this is the theme we chose for this year’s International Repair Day.

Here at The Restart Project, our primary mission is to fix our relationship with electronics.

On Saturday 17th October we’ll celebrate the fourth edition of International Repair Day.

We cover 12 London boroughs with our Repair Directory.

The need for electronic devices is high The last few months have shown us how much we rely on our electronic devices.

Because some of us are definitely escaping this summer through books, we thought we’d publish an extended summer reading list.

It’s been a big fortnight for those watching big tech and their impact on the planet, here in the UK and beyond.

Update 31 July: We’ve published the playlist of Fixfest session videos here.

Last week, we gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) as a part of their electronic waste inquiry.

We are very happy to announce that The Restart Project is a partner of “Sharepair”, a new project to help build a “digital support infrastructure for citizens in the repair economy”.

After our initial disappointment in cancelling a live event in Glasgow, we’re really excited about Fixfest UK this year.

The coronavirus pandemic has presented huge challenges to communities around the world.

A new poll by YouGov shows that more Britons would like to repair their smartphones instead of replacing them (47%), as opposed to those who would prefer to get a new one (45%).

Many groups in our network are using our software to log community repair data after events.

For Earth Day, we ran an online activity called “Mobiles Come from the Earth” aimed at kids, but really for anybody over 10 years old.

We co-hosted a webinar entitled “Are We Prepared to Repair COVID-19 Medical Equipment” with industry ally ABI Electronics, a Yorkshire-based manufacturer of advanced diagnostic and component-level repair equipment for industries like transport, aerospace.

Together with our volunteers, we’ve spent the last couple of days intensively diving into the world of repair of critical care medical equipment and ventilators.

We’re a founding member of the European Right to Repair Campaign, who celebrated a major milestone yesterday, with the release of the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan.

Tell us a little about yourself.

London has the scale and the opportunity to be one of the leading cities in the promotion of reuse and repair of electricals and electronics, the prevention of e-waste, and recycling.

Through the Refer Project together with organisations in 5 other countries, and illustrator Rod Hunt, last year we created educational resources on the raw materials in electronics for use at community repair events.

UPDATE (4th June 2020): Fixfest UK is online, June 4th – July 9th.

If you look at the map of businesses listed in our Repair Directory, you’ll notice something exciting: we have added a new borough!

We’re getting our calendar ready for the beginning of 2020.

With 2019 drawing to a close, we’re feeling reflective here at Restart.

We hosted a celebration of International Repair Day event in Brixton at our home 3Space International House.

This guest post is written by Philip Le Riche, Wiki Community Coordinator Around 5 years ago when Restart consisted of just a few dozen Londoners, it was evident that the sum of the expertise of all the volunteers was much greater than that of any one of…

Having run the first-ever Fixfest two years ago, we were thrilled that Runder Tisch Reparatur (German Repair Round Table) ran such an inspiring event in Berlin this past weekend.

Last month, on the invitation of the Virtual School at Croydon Council, we worked with 15-20 asylum-seeking youth in a summer school.

We’re really excited to participate in the second-ever global Fixfest in Berlin later this month.

We shot past another Earth Overshoot Day this summer.

We appear on The One Show this evening, calling out in-built obsolescence and short product lifetimes and fixing with our community in Brixton.

It’s annual tradition here at Restart — our top reads for the summer.

Following much attention to the climate crisis, and the passage of a binding net-zero emissions target here in the UK, we’ve had quite a couple of weeks promoting the Right to Repair.

Tell us a little about yourself.

We’re celebrating having reached 1,000 events logged in our repairs database, affectionately known as the Fixometer.

A climate emergency has been all over the news in the UK recently.

The environmental cost of our electronics consumption is a global problem requiring a global response.

Tell us a little about yourself My old boss at Maplin said ‘you’ve always got everything in pieces’ – showing disapproval of my determination to fix customers broken electronics before even attempting to sell them a replacement!

We launched the first version of our Repair Directory over a year ago, listing businesses from seven East and North London boroughs.

We’re really happy to share this guest blog post, written by Twitter user @BenefitsBlues, who recounts their experience attending a Restart Party run by a local group in Kilburn, at Abbey Community Centre.

For Open Data Day, March 2, we celebrated our first ever open dive into our repair database, AKA the Fixometer.