A Growing Number of ‘Repair Cafes’ Are Popping Up Around the World to Curb Consumer Waste - Inside Climate News
A Growing Number of ‘Repair Cafes’ Are Popping Up Around the World to Curb Consumer Waste - Inside Climate News
Local communities are hosting events where people can bring in their broken goods for repairs—free of charge.Inside Climate News
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Cherry
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •raman_klogius
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •dustyData
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in reply to raman_klogius • • •frunch
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •abeorch
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • •ch00f
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •Over the past week, I’ve repaired an air filter that had a corroded trace inside its fan motor controller, a pair of Bluetooth headphones that had sweat ingress bust the power button, and I’m working on rebuilding an LCD driver for an old piece of Mattel electronics.
I’m very interested in this article.
Edit: and I forgot to mention the time a few months ago where a friend ordered a walking treadmill from Amazon that was DOA, so they just sent her a new one and told her to scrap the original. Turns out the power connector was unplugged from the mainboard receptacle.
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DominusOfMegadeus
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in reply to ☂️- • • •ch00f
in reply to DominusOfMegadeus • • •PhilipTheBucket
in reply to ch00f • • •ch00f
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •There are studies that show that people care for things more if they had a hand in creating/fixing them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_eff…
Though I personally have more of a love hate relationship with my IKEA furniture.
cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Flamekebab
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •SuiXi3D
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •Good.
I’ve worked in tech basically all my life. Everything from IT to shuffling wafer around a fab to now working for an aerospace parts supplier as an electrical tech.
The amount of waste is… it’s shocking. A board fails, and half of these companies throw it away. The other half sends it off to be ‘recycled’ as if that’s any better in the long run. Just because one chip is bad or whatever doesn’t mean the rest of the components on the board are bad.
That being said, I understand the massive amount of labor it would take to desolder every component on a board just to add them to stock. That’s why nobody does it. You’d need an army of people to properly remove and test every component on a failed board.
But, like, you don’t have to? All those components are already in a spot where they won’t get lost and can be retrieved when needed: on the failed board. Thankfully the company I work for now understands that buying things to be shipped takes a lot more time than just… taking an hour to steal a chip from a failed board and using that.
I worked for a company before that had at least half of the boards come off the wave solder machines with problems. Excess solder in places it shouldn’t be, failed components everywhere, and basic assembly issues. They’d toss these boards in a corner of the building to be repaired later. The issue is that they just couldn’t quit taking people away from rework and putting them on assembly. The engineers never bothered to come downstairs and actually do their jobs. So the failed boards never got worked on, and they kept generating a mountain of them.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m glad people are actually fixing stuff instead of throwing it away. Were that this would become the norm.
Cherry
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Cherry
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •DominusOfMegadeus
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in reply to DominusOfMegadeus • • •quick_snail
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •ButteryMonkey
in reply to quick_snail • • •My guess is because a lot of cheaper electronics are genuinely not worth repairing if you have to pay for it, even if the repair takes literally seconds to do, and anything that’s worth paying to repair can already be taken to eg computer repair places.
The world we live in now is absolutely full of cheap electronics. That stuff breaks more often than better built and thus pricier models, so it should be the first stuff to get fixed. And that kinda requires free repair.
I mean how much would you pay to fix a $20 coffee maker/kettle?
Galactose
in reply to ButteryMonkey • • •quick_snail
in reply to ButteryMonkey • • •a4ng3l
in reply to quick_snail • • •Yeah but here’s the catch. If you want them to look at your shit it’s a flat €80 fee here. Whatever the outcome. And then you pay for parts with insane markups. And if it requires thinkering well they don’t do that (my American fridge where the dispenser lever isn’t made anymore- no interest in doing custom print or bypass).
So unless you have happy interested passionate persons which usually is a hacker’s club you only have those kind of services it seems
recklessengagement
in reply to quick_snail • • •BastingChemina
in reply to quick_snail • • •There is a free repair cafe near me and I'm thinking of creating one as well.
Since they get money from the city to do so that don't want to overlap on professional repair shops. So they only repair things that professional shop don't repair because it's not economically interesting for them.
Despite this rule they get a lot of repairs to do.
Because currently in rich country, repairing things is not a viable career outside of few niche areas.
quick_snail
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •PhilipTheBucket
in reply to quick_snail • • •cartel to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)nullroot
in reply to quick_snail • • •PhilipTheBucket
in reply to nullroot • • •At one point I invested in a $10 light bulb from Home Depot because the packaging assured me that it would last for years and years and so it was actually better than the big packages of ones that were cheap. It stopped working in a few weeks. I went back and asked one of their valued team members about it, and he said maybe the "board" on it "went out," which apparently happens to them a lot.
I kind of knew when I bought it that it was bullshit, but I didn't expect it to be such bullshit.
Krudler
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •CFL turned out to be a massive lie/scam.
Pay anywhere from 8x-50x more per bulb... yeah the individual LEDs won't die but the device itself is usually fried in 3 months. Meanwhile I've got $0.25 incandescent bulbs that are 10 years old.
The potential "energy savings" are always trumpeted from the rooftops, but in the actual application you end up spending more because the constant waste/replace cycle vastly offsets any trivial amount of electricity saved.
recklessengagement
in reply to PhilipTheBucket • • •PeacefulForest
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in reply to PeacefulForest • •Uplifting News reshared this.