The UK is the second highest producer of e-waste per capita in the world, let's fix that...
by The Restart Project in London, Greater London, United Kingdom
With additional funding, we will encourage new communities to get involved in fixing by working with partners to attract younger and more diverse audiences to attend events. Further funding will allow us to work in deprived areas to offer events in the heart of hard to reach communities. By targeting where we work and who we work with, we can ensure that fixing skills, which can help people save money and tackle climate change, are made available to those that need them most.
Most of us don’t want to throw our stuff away and replace it all the time. But things don’t last as long as they should, and right now, it’s too hard to get our devices repaired.
The result: electronics are the fastest growing waste stream globally. Each year across the world, the e-waste we produce weighs more than the Great Wall of China.
This constant push to buy new and add to a growing waste mountain is not only bad for the planet, but it's harmful to people too. Many of the appliances and devices we use every day contain resources mined under terrible conditions, so there are a lot of good reasons to reduce our dependence on throwaway electronics.
The Restart Project aims to fix our relationship with electronics.
We support communities to run Restart Parties where people teach each other how to repair their broken and slow devices – from tablets to toasters, from iPhones to headphones.
We work with community repair groups across the world to help more people give their devices a second life. And we campaign for our Right to Repair, to make future products easier and more affordable to repair.
Image credit: Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
It's no coincidence our crowdfunder launched around Black Friday! At a time when we're encouraged to buy new stuff - whether we need it or not - we want to highlight the options available to value the things we already have.
We are crowdfunding for three main reasons:
Awareness: we need to raise awareness of the growing e-waste crisis, and just as important, awareness around the alternatives to buying new. We need to help people find ways to repair and reuse their things, and demand access to repair and reuse for everyone.
Community support: we support groups across the UK to help people to fix their things. These groups help build strong communities. We want to continue and grow this support next year through peer learning, free resources such as Restarters.net, and insurance for those in our network.
Training and skillshares: we want to grow the next generation of fixers. We will do this by extending our free training courses to more 18-24 year olds, and run even more Rosie the Restarter events for women and non-binary people, helping to bring more women into the fixer movement.
Image credit: Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Over the last 10 years we have created a global community that has already had a huge impact on e-waste. To date, 700+ repair groups have achieved the following:
We have grown our London community by 150% in the last twelve months and continue to support a wider network of community repair groups across the UK: helping groups to connect and learn from each other, providing a platform to promote events and monitor impact, and comprehensively mapping the 500 amazing repair cafes in the UK.
Your donations, doubled by Aviva, will help us grow our impact and fix our relationship with electronics.
You may have noticed our crowdfunder doesn’t have the traditional rewards. This is for a few reasons, but mainly because our goal is to reduce things people have, rather than adding to them. We would love donors to become part of our community instead:
Thank you for your support,
The Restart Team