Bath Repair Cafe BA1 6RA

When fixing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, recycling becomes a political act, say Repair Cafe volunteers.

A vacuum cleaner, a hair straightener, a laptop, Christmas lights, an e-reader, a blender, a kettle, two bags, a pair of jeans, a remote-control helicopter, a spoon, a dining-room chair, a lamp and hair clippers. All broken.

It sounds like a pile of things that you’d stick in boxes and take to the tip. In fact, it’s a list of things mended in a single afternoon by British volunteers determined to get people to stop throwing stuff away.

An estimated 300,000 tonnes of clothing was sent to landfill in the UK in 2016 and a report from Wrap puts the average lifespan for a piece of clothing in the UK at 3.3 years.

Globally, the amount of e-waste generated is expected to hit 50m tonnes by the end of 2018. This is partly driven by consumers’ eagerness for new products, but there are also concerns about built-in obsolescence, in which manufacturers design products to break down after a certain amount of time and are often difficult or expensive to fix.

In the year since our first Café opened on April 21st 2017 we have looked at over 350 items and mended over 68% of them.