In taking up repair…we prompt a conversation and inquiry into the ethics and practice of care — of things, but also of each other, our environment and our communities.
— Brian Goldberg, Rhode Island School of Design
Let’s take simple hospitality as our starting point. As Repair Cafe hosts, we gladly welcome our invited guests. A Repair Cafe extends two invitations. The first is, “Let’s see about repairing that thing you’ve brought there.” And the second, “In the meantime, would you like a cup of coffee or tea?” Important things happen over a warm beverage — and at a repair worktable. Barbara Lane, who does jewelry repairs, puts it this way: “No job is insignificant. People bring in some weird things to be repaired, and it is not up to us to judge what is worthy or not worthy to be ‘fixed.’ I surmise that many people use the Repair Cafe as a means to get out of their house and have some interaction with other human beings — humans who will listen to them, laugh a little, and maybe even cry with them.”
Martine Postma decided to use the word cafe because she wanted to be sure people understand that they are coming into an informal and convivial social space. As much as we focus on repair, the “cafe side” is essential to our purpose. The attention we pay to community repair as a social gathering is not beside the point — it is the point. In the UK, the Restart project calls their events parties “because they have a fun, ad-hoc spirit where all are welcome to meet, mingle, and share in the fun of repair.”
Long before she’d ever heard of a Repair Cafe, much less started one, coauthor Elizabeth Knight was the tea sommelier for the St. Regis Hotel (the original Saint Regis was the patron saint of hospitality and social workers) on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Prior to that, she’d written books about tea — the plant, the drink, the meal, the experience. She lived for a time in London, the home of the afternoon tea ceremony, and witnessed tea grown, blended, processed, and packaged in countries around the world. She learned that in China, tea is so essential to daily life that even during the Communist Revolution, when true tea was scarce, people served each other cups of hot water to keep their social connections alive. There, it’s still considered bad form to pour your own tea; it means that no one cares about you. The same holds true in London, where she often saw one man, of a group of businessmen seated around a table, ask, “Shall I be Mum?” before pouring the steaming-hot “sociallubricant” into everyone’s cup. In Japan, the daughter of a tea master who had studied the way of tea for fifty years told Elizabeth that the point of the ritual is to focus attention on the fleeting moment. In the words of the sixteenth-century tea master Sen-Rikyū: “This occasion and this meeting may come only once in a lifetime; therefore it should be highly valued.” The sentiment of this may seem overstated for someone who has brought their blender to be repaired, but in our experience, it fits well the experience of the people who bring a profoundly beloved item for our attention — and there are many.
Radical Hospitality
Then there is the practice known as radical hospitality, which asks much more. The idea comes down to us from the Rule of Saint Benedict, a set of fifth-century monastic precepts written by Benedict of Nursia for the monks living under Benedictine rule. Christine Valters Paintner, a prolific writer on spirituality and creativity, says, “Benedict’s Rule is a foundational expression of the principle of hospitality at work: Instead of being able to say that God appears only in what is familiar, only in the people who make me feel comfortable and safe and look like me, hospitality calls on us to extend ourselves, to risk.”
Since 2013, the Repair Cafe in New Paltz, New York, has been hosted by the United Methodist Church, and every Sunday morning, Pastor Jennifer Berry invites the congregation to Communion with these words:
Every color of the earth, every corner of the globe, old or young, you are welcome. Able to come on your own two feet, needing the help of canes, crutches, or prosthetics or the strong arm of a neighbor, or needing the elements brought to you, are welcome. Whatever your sexual orientation, however you are dressed, you are welcome. If you feel you are worthy, you are welcome. If you feel you are unworthy, Christ Jesus welcomes you to his table.
This is a beautiful expression of “radical hospitality.” And although we are likely to think that something radical is “extreme,” the word’s true first meaning is “from the root.” So, rather than thinking of radical hospitality as something out of the norm, we can consider it a fundamental practice, “arising from the source.” Jeanette Nakada, baker, seamstress, and founder of the Repair Cafe in Lincoln, Nebraska, says, “We intentionally located in the oldest part of the city, a high-density area with a vibrant, eclectic population that includes many renters as well as immigrants, refugees, and neighbors with lower incomes. Inviting others to bring things to us means we won’t be strangers very long. We know a good number of those former strangers will visit us again and will become familiar faces.”
We only have what we give.
— Chilean novelist Isabel Allende
Self-Sufficiency Is Self-Evident
In the Forrestal Heights public housing complex in the City of Beacon, New York, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funds a program called “Resident Opportunity and Self-Sufficiency.” As part of this program, a Repair Cafe is set up in the Community Room from time to time, and neighbors from the nearly 250 apartments can bring things to be repaired. When people don’t have extra money to buy and replace things, a free service like this is cost-effective. It’s also a welcome reason to get out of their apartments and be sociable with their neighbors — a mix of seniors, families, and a few singles. The “hurdle of pride” may make some hesitate to bring something broken, but Noah Hargett, the program coordinator, mostly discounts that. He wants people coming in from everywhere in the city. “It breathes in more life, brings in new stories. People get to see who we are and what we’re doing here, instead of just driving by.”
“This is the thing,” says Kingston resident Teryl Mickens. “When we care to repair items, we are caring for our children, your children and all of our grandchildren. Clothing, electronics, jewelry — whatever you bring. Folks, especially those who are poor, are conditioned to throwing away the old and broken, and buying the new and shiny. I’ve learned a lot by seeing people repair, repurpose, and reconsider their own paid-for possessions.” Jordan Scruggs, a Methodist deacon active in a program called Kingston Midtown Rising, says self-sufficiency is a self-evident community goal. “This is more than just an opportunity to fix broken things. It’s also an opportunity to fix broken systems and relationships. The Repair Cafe is organized around the ethos of skill sharing. That’s a mutually beneficial and empowering thing. It creates opportunities to nurture neighborly networks. It calls on the invaluable wealth of community knowledge and know-how.”
Her gratitude was enormous. It’s like a contact high. You feed off of that. It feels like a blessing. Those are the small important things in life I think you can easily miss, and at the Repair Cafe it’s just one after another like that.
— Patty, sewing volunteer at Repair PDX, Portland, Oregon
ELECTRICIAN’S DAUGHTER
Jo Schilling’s dad was an independent electrical contractor and a fifty-year member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 494 in Milwaukee. “Ever since I was a little girl,” she says, “I loved my dad’s workshop.” He showed her how to use tools properly, starting with a coping saw. “Electrical wire was the thread and fabric of my life!”
Her whole family made things. They grew and preserved food, repaired and reconstructed things. “I learned at a young age how to create and make things out of the materials that were close at hand.” When Jo was fifteen, her dad gave her a shoemaker’s treadle sewing machine because she wanted to work with leather and make purses and moccasins and belts. When she was thirty, he gave her a heavy-duty vise for her basement workbench. “He was so happy,” she says. “He just felt I needed that to keep the house going. He was right. I’ve used it a lot.” Jo has always been the one to take care of her house.
Along the way, she met a songwriter who was so impressed with her skills that he wrote a song about her, in the voice of Jo’s daughter Natalie.
My Mom’s an electrician’s daughter
I’m so glad my grandpa taught her
How to use the tools he bought her
Anything that gives us trouble
Mom can fix it on the double
Jo’s dad loved to ask questions of complete strangers. So does she. Her dad had an endless curiosity about what makes things tick. So does she. “One of the key things I do when something needs repair,” says Jo, “is to think, okay, this was working before. What has changed, and why? I work backwards from there to figure it out.” Just like her dad.
Mama grab the wrench
Mama grab the screwdriver
Fix the thing herself
Or if she don’t know how to
She’ll call someone else
Mama’s never too proud to
And when Jo does have a repairman in, she’s right there, learning everything she can. “My dad always told me that a hardware store contains a wealth of knowledge. When he passed, I knew that taking a project to the guys at my hardware store would mean I’ve got someone else to figure it out with.”
“Giving me these skills was his way of sharing his love with me. He taught me what he knew. And even now, when I’m trying to fix something, I try to channel him and think: How would Dad approach this repair?”
Mom’s an electrician’s daughter
Box of tools my grandpa bought her
Sitting on a bench in the basement
Filled with magic and amazement!
Bicycle Samaritans
Two categories weigh in heavily on the “make-a-difference” repair scale: bicycles and digital devices. Bicycles are a vital means of transportation for many people in U.S. cities and even more so around the world. When Dave Panico, an electrical engineer, was shown “a huge jumbled pile of bikes” that had been donated to the soon-to-be-opened Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Kingston, New York, he thought, “I can’t stand to see them sent to a landfill. I believe we are stewards of the earth and the environment.” Combined with Habitat’s mission to give folks a “hand up,” repairing the bikes seemed to Dave like a perfect way to help people and the environment. It didn’t hurt that he’s an avid cyclist. He assembled a small team of like-minded folks to meet on Wednesday nights and start working through them. Four years later, they’ve restored more than three hundred bikes.
There are bicycle repair “samaritans” like these all over the world.
“The first year we did this, all the bikes got stolen from an unlocked building,” recalls Bill Shader. “And I mean all the bikes we’d spent the last several months fixing up.” That was in Pittsburgh in the early 2000s. The city had put out the call for used bicycles in any condition, and Bill says in those days about half the bikes that came in were better sold for scrap. Over time, things improved. The group of cycling enthusiasts who volunteered to do the work got better at it, bicycle shops started donating parts, and a foundation with programs overseas got involved.
The used bicycle economy is more layered than you might think. Bill helps break it down for us. The players are metal scavengers, bicycle shop owners, police and public works departments, recreation programs, social services nonprofits, the overseas market — and guys like him. Let’s look at the source first: the scavengers. There are people everywhere who drive the county roads looking for scrap metal to sell. Older bikes made from steel typically weigh twenty to thirty pounds. A kids’ mountain bike bought at a department store might weigh thirty-five pounds. The metal scavengers Bill knows will apply their best judgment, and if they think a bike is too good to scrap, they’ll drop it off in his driveway. The police get involved by picking up the skeletons of derelict bikes, often left padlocked to a fence somewhere. Bill’s township holds an annual cleanup day, when generations of bicycles get fished out of basements and garages, the kids who once rode them having grown up and moved away. Many bicycle store owners recognize their role as well and are an invaluable source of parts. The local weekly or Penny-Saver will carry occasional reminders for donations, and Bill says he still gets calls from people who saw a feature article titled “Pedal Power” that ran in their monthly lifestyle magazine six years ago.
Wherever they come from, the bikes get collected in a workspace. In Bill’s township, fifteen miles south of Pittsburgh, the space is a garage bay at the Department of Public Works. Then the triage happens. “Pump-ups” need the least work; clean them and they’re ready to go. Bikes that have been sitting out in the weather may be fine mechanically but need new cables and lube. It’s rare to have to replace chains or spokes. A real time-consuming job is getting the rust off the rims. “When you get a bike that’s just too much work,” Bill says, “it becomes parts. Do you have any idea how many sizes of seat posts there are?”
The “pipeline,” as Bill calls it (his career was in construction management), leads to the distributors, those who get the bikes to their future home. The main distinction there is whether bikes are given free to children’s homes and social services clients, or resold to provide a revenue stream for a nonprofit. Bill is willing to split his inventory between the two. A foundation called Brother to Brother ships all over the world, to places where a bicycle makes the difference between a recipient’s ability to get to a job four miles away or a job that’s triple that distance. Or a bike that will increase the number of homes a healthcare worker can reach in a day. The demand is always greater than what Bill and other bicycle samaritans like him can possibly supply.
There is a big buildup to the holiday season at the end of the year. “By then, I’ve had my fill,” Bill says. “But then you get a bike that mechanically is ready to go but is a bit rusty. You look at it and you think, ‘If a kid got this on Christmas, is he going to be happy?’ So you spend the extra time. It’s obviously a used bike, but it’s a good-looking used bike. I’ve done what I can, then I’m happy.”
REPAIR CAFE GLASGOW’S “PRAMAGEDDON”
Scotland’s Repair Cafe Glasgow launched Pram Project in 2019 to help parents and children in need of vital transport. They put out a call for donations of prams (better known in the United States as baby strollers) and were inundated with requests for drop-offs and pickups. They posted this on their Instagram in August 2019: “Pramageddon has truly been upon us over the last two weeks.” Since then they have been fine-tuning their process of collecting, receiving, cleaning, and repairing the prams and then getting them out to families who need them.
One sure source of prams has been the large St. Enoch Centre shopping mall in Glasgow, where unwanted prams are simply left abandoned. The prams are steam-cleaned, repaired to ensure they are safe, and then given to families. What started as a collection drive to meet an immediate need has grown into a long-term project with many partners. One partner is Refuweegee, a radical hospitality initiative started by a group of Glaswegians in 2015 to provide community-made “welcome packs” to “forcibly displaced people arriving in Glasgow.” As often as needed, they include a pram with the welcome pack.
“We know that it can make people’s lives a hell of a lot easier,” says Lauren Crilly, Repair Cafe Glasgow’s communications officer, “and we hope we will be able to provide families across Glasgow with as many pre-loved prams as possible.”
Repair Cafe Glasgow’s founder Jon Dawes (left) and Anne Ledgerwood of St. Enoch Centre with two unwanted prams recovered by Pram Project and ready to be steam-cleaned.
Inclusive Repair
Repairing brings people together who otherwise might never find themselves in the same room. Time and time again, it provides opportunities for enhancing individual and collective well-being. But a subtle and interesting new dynamic has emerged. With growing frequency, people with autism have been participating in community repair events. What is attracting them?
Frank Szenher, a retired IBM engineer, started bringing a couple of high school kids to our Repair Cafes, where they quickly became regulars. “Through a youth mentoring program, I’ve been working with kids on the autism spectrum. Andrew is a computer whiz and is now attending community college. Michael was in a school-to-work program called Youth Soft Skills Empowerment. I volunteered to tutor him in electronics twice a week for his senior year. And then I was his job coach during his trial employment as a repair technician at a record store. Now he’s repairing vintage audio equipment full time. Amazing how the demand for that has returned!”
General statements about people with autism may often give you the wrong idea, simply because of the wide range of variability among autistics and other neurodivergents (NDs) — a broader term describing people with neurological characteristics outside the norm. Even the experience of one person can change, depending on the activity, the environment, and their recent experiences.
A person with autism may show up to a repair event for the same reason as anyone else: something has stopped working. But for her or him this may be much more than an inconvenience; it can be a big deal. Suddenly having to learn to use a new device is discomfiting. Discovering that there is a place where you might get your familiar device working again is not trivial. It is consequential in ways others may not grasp.
Panda Méry is active with Restart in England. As an ND, he’s been able to communicate his own experiences and help others understand the strategies autistics may employ in their day-to-day lives. In blog posts and podcasts, he relates why repair activities and, more specifically, community repair events are so well suited to NDs. Why have they been seeking out repair events, and what is their experience of repairing?
First, Panda explains, there is an attraction to technical things. Problem solving and close observation are enjoyable for many autistics, especially when you’re using your hands and tools. These activities invite intense focus, particularly in the diagnostic stage. In a sense, Panda says, you welcome the object into your social sphere, and a kind of conversation ensues. How is the device reacting, and how can you test it, question it, probe for answers? Of course, the person who brought the item is also there — a complete stranger, exactly the kind of social situation that is often challenging for NDs. And this is where Panda observes a therapeutic accommodation: “As soon as I have something in my hands, I am more comfortable talking to people.” Small talk can emerge easily from that unselfconscious “flow state” — and small talk is good social connectivity.
A completed repair is a shared joy and a meaningful experience (you helped the device live longer!) And when something isn’t repairable, it might be a “small tragedy,” but it also more likely adds to your storehouse of patience. Panda points out two other dynamics that organizers should be aware of when working with ND repair coaches. NDs tend not to be collaborative repairers. Once they have “entered the fix,” they won’t be noticing what’s happening at other tables and will be unlikely to invite another coach in on their “conversation” with the item. They may also be more persistent than other coaches in their quest to make a repair, which means they’ll need more time and will likely see fewer items. They’ll also likely be happier if there is no line at their table, and people aren’t hovering.
Repairing also offers the opportunity to design specific events for people with specific goals and needs, including NDs. An organization in Florida has developed a first-of-its-kind repair program for adults with autism.
Earth to Autism
When Leanne Scalli was in fourth grade, she wanted to be an environmental scientist. She grew up to earn her doctorate in social science instead, and she now works with adults with autism in St. Petersburg, Florida. When she had the opportunity to start her own program, images of the Earth kept coming to her. “I’ve always been really passionate about taking care of the planet, and I thought, what if we put those two things together? Put autism to work on environmental issues.” In 2017, Earth to Autism, or E2A, formed as a nonprofit.
Their first Repair Cafe was an experiment. People with autism don’t typically experience the world as a communal place, and there are precious few opportunities for them to work together. A Repair Cafe would be asking them to look around the room and recognize that they had all come for a common purpose. Their interest in repair and affinity for gadgets is not in question. “Electronics, video games, and bicycles too, are all fascinating to a lot of people with autism,” says Leanne. “But what’s so great about Repair Cafe for E2A is the social component.” It is a misconception that adults with autism don’t want to socialize, and communicating with someone about the item they’ve brought to be fixed is a unique opportunity for reciprocal conversation.
Eighty-five percent of adults with autism in the United States are unemployed. The mission of Earth to Autism is to teach pre-employment skills for green industry careers. Leanne has seen the demand for digital repair growing, and she hopes demand will grow for other kinds of repairs too. Earth to Autism started its “Ambassador in Training” program in 2019 to teach a range of repair skills. Each trainee, or ambassador, has a mentor, and experts from the greater Tampa area volunteer to work with them. There is now an E2A Repair Cafe every month; here their training gets put to immediate use, and they are the experts. Technical skills combine with the soft skills of self-awareness. Arianna Reybitz helped coordinate the first Repair Cafes, and she credits Leanne with helping her gain the confidence she needed to be hired as biology lab instructor at St. Petersburg College. She continues working with E2A, and she and her mom repair jewelry at the Repair Cafes. “It’s cool now that they are happening every month. More people can get their things fixed, get to meet each other. We’ll be noticed a lot more, and get more people to join our group.”
All told, a community repair experience can offer multiple gains to people with autism. You are out of your house, interacting with others and making friends. You are focusing your intelligence in ways that are satisfying to you and appreciated by others. And if the event has been organized to meet your needs reasonably well, you may want to come back. The repair movement globally is working to make its events as inclusive as possible to everyone.
Too Good to Toss
Many projects inhabit the same social ecosystem as community repair but do not involve any actual repair of things. Rather, their purpose is to repair the social fabric through acts of caring and sharing or to provide counterweights to waste. Most are straightforward in concept and highly replicable. Towns all across the land have some version of a spring cleanup week, when the Department of Public Works will haul away just about anything residents put out on the curb. But before that can happen, people come from as far away as they wish and roam the streets at night in their pickups on a grand scavenger hunt, sorting through the curbside piles for the usable and the fixable. It’s an unofficial but tolerated way to keep a significant volume of stuff out of the landfill, and everyone wins.
Now imagine a highly organized, community-spirited variation that provides a public space to collect and share unwanted goods with those who could use them. In the light of day! The town of Warwick, New York, holds one such event every spring. It’s held in a park on the closest weekend to Earth Day and prior to their annual bulk trash pickup. They call it “Too Good to Toss,” and to pull it off, all they need is a few good organizers, the full cooperation of the town and village, and about a hundred volunteers who fit the job description: positive, welcoming, respectful, flexible, helpful. Acceptable items for donation must be clean and in full working order, with all the parts. Unacceptable items include auto parts, TVs, computers, grills, large appliances, and other items deemed unacceptable by the Department of Public Works. Saturday is drop-off day, Sunday is come-take-it-away-for-free day, and hundreds of people come. The Salvation Army, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the Humane Society, and local charities take things too. The number of donations and shoppers has increased every year, and still, when it’s all over, less than one-half of one dumpster of unwanted stuff is left over. Anything recyclable is pulled out of that before the remainder is hauled away, and one community’s waste is reduced from a mountain to a molehill.
Swap/Meet
Clothing swaps have become a vibrant part of the sharing economy in Portland, Oregon. One version, organized by Swap Positive, is called “free fashion & frugal fun.” Their rules read, in part: “You agree that you will not sell anything that you received at any Free Swap. Re-sellers, hoarders, and factious people will be asked to leave. People who come to free swaps have found that as they have given freely of what they no longer need, they have received freely cool new stuff! Plus, remainders are donated to organizations that will give them away for free, so everyone is a philanthropist!”
Sarah Guldenbrein has swapped clothes at the Portland free swap and is also a sewing volunteer at Repair PDX — the Repair Cafe in Portland. As a graduate student in sociology, she wrote her master’s thesis about both experiences, seeking insight into how these social innovations give people an alternative to the negative effects of “fast fashion.” She interviewed participants at a number of events and found that their reasons for coming were, of course, varied: to save money, for the opportunity to connect with like-minded people, for the “pleasure of refreshing their wardrobe,” and so on. Participants included “hardcore” middle-aged shoppers and also younger people with limited resources who are looking for a “slow fashion” alternative. Sarah found that to some extent, their personal motivations also aligned with the larger goals of degrowth (“reducing the ecological impact of the global economy to a sustainable level”) and decommodification (“a shift away from production and profits and towards well-being and care”). And while she observed that the participants in the clothing swaps were predominantly white, college-educated, and young, she concluded that “in a social climate where many feel paralyzed by the magnitude of change that is required, degrowth offers a glimmer of optimism, and the promise of actionable change.”
Repair and repairability have caught the attention of many companies pledged to the “triple bottom line” of people, planet, and profits, as well as the 250,000 or so business members of the American Sustainable Business Council. Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar made a case for “brand activism” in the Marketing Journal, noting that “Millennials have high expectations for brands.…Many would like brands to show concern not just for profits but for the communities they serve, and the world we live in.” And in a Q&A published in the Wall Street Journal Online, Paul Alexander, chief marketing officer of Eastern Bank, said, “Brand purpose of this nature is a marathon, not a sprint. Tying it to outcomes takes time, and everybody wants case studies showing positive results. The proof will come when those who step out on this plank thrive. That’s what’s going to convince hearts and minds. Let’s put it this way: I’m cautiously pessimistic. I’m hopeful more brands will consider it, but I’m cognizant of the real world.”
It is common knowledge that the fossil fuel industry, for one, has been engaged in brand activism for many years, successfully fomenting doubt about climate science, exactly as Big Tobacco did for smoking. And the hegemony of Big Tech in electronics and appliances has a corollary in the phenomenon of “perceived obsolescence” in the garment industry. In her book True Wealth, Juliet Schor addresses the psychology underlying fast-fashion marketing, which she says “fosters an unhealthy dissatisfaction with what one has and anxiety about falling behind.” Mending and visible mending are creative and outspoken responses to textile waste and toxicity, but as designer and scientist Mark Liu writes, “the scale of fast fashion is so massive it can easily eclipse other sustainability initiatives.” Here the question becomes, How will the fashion industry ever care enough about the citizen consumers of the world to “slow down” and work to repair itself?
“We’re trying to take responsibility. We need to move from a use-and-discard economy to a reuse economy,” says Eileen Fisher, who founded her company in 1984 with $350 in start-up money and created her now iconic “breezy and unbothered” brand with pieces made from organic fibers. The irony is that over time, Fisher faced up to the fact that organic is not synonymous with sustainable. It takes 713 gallons of water to make one cotton shirt, organic or no. So the company created its “Renew” brand, made from clothing bought back from its customers. This is not a small-scale effort. In May 2018, the company reclaimed its millionth garment, and it continues to collect as many as three thousand garments each week. More significantly, the company is now focused on the process of remanufacturing: creating new raw material by dismantling and machine-felting garments at its “Tiny Factory” in Irvington, New York.
H&M Group (Hennes & Mauritz) is the Swedish multinational clothing-retail company that largely created the fast-fashion business model. In 2016, it announced a recycling initiative that was a carbon copy of Eileen Fisher’s, but when challenged over the results, H&M admitted that less than 1 percent of its clothing included recycled fibers. Mind you, H&M’s annual revenue is more than twenty-five billion dollars, while Eileen Fisher’s is on the order of three hundred million dollars. But here is the interesting development: local media reports that reps from H&M have been spending time at Eileen Fisher’s remanufacturing factory. “We realized that we need to share what we know,” Fisher says. “We need to teach other people, because we’re like a drop in the bucket. We’re one mid-sized company, and that’s great, but unless the rest of the industry follows then we’re not going to solve the problem.” The industry is responding. At the October 2019 Textile Exchange Sustainability Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, H&M Group and IKEA, the other Swedish retail giant, announced a collaboration on a large-scale study to review chemical content in postconsumer textile recycling, with the “ambition to become 100% circular and renewable.”
In 2015, the Patagonia clothing company launched its “Worn Wear” project. The project’s “mobile repair wagons” visit towns and college campuses across the United States and Europe — driven by peripatetic “sewists” who will mend one clothing item of any kind per visitor. At a stop at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, designer and product developer Denise Neil told us how many innovations in clothing manufacture actually move through the industry: it is at the factory level. “We work with different factories, and they may recommend our ideas about how to make things more sustainably to other companies, such as better ways to reinforce seams or to reduce production scrap with smarter pattern design. Likewise, they make recommendations to us all the time. It’s a give and take of sharing best practices.” The difference is whether those practices are about making things more cheaply, as has been the norm, or about making things that last. The very next day, Denise would be visiting Eileen Fisher’s remanufacturing factory to exchange ideas for making things that last. “We’re always wanting to learn,” she says.
Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia, has been quoted widely, saying, “Why is repair such a radical act? Fixing something we might otherwise throw away is almost inconceivable to many in the heyday of fast fashion and rapidly advancing technology, but the impact is enormous. As individual consumers, the single best thing we can do for the planet is to keep our stuff in use longer.”
And the single best way to keep stuff in use longer is to give people a practical alternative to throwing it away. The solution is obvious: start a community repair project in your town. In the next chapter, we provide you with the conceptual and practical tools to do just that.