Can we fix it? Yes we can, and we should.
It’s Sunday morning, and the Wānaka Community Workshop is abuzz with power drills, bobbin winders and hammers. Outside under a marquee, someone is sorting out the drivetrain on a vintage Mongoose hybrid bike. In the main workspace, a wooden chair, a planer and a toaster are under repair. Next door, four sewing machines whirl away.
We’re at the latest Wastebusters Repair Revolution event. Run several times per year by Wānaka Wastebusters, a local recycling and reuse centre, these “repair cafés” see an army of volunteer fixer-uppers, from sewers to electricians to joiners, take to all that is broken, ripped, jammed or cracked. It’s free to bring your items along (though koha is appreciated), which is great both for saving money and for keeping stuff out of our landfills. Plus, it’s a satisfying way of sticking it to late-stage capitalism.
They don’t make things like they used to
Once upon a time, someone in almost every household knew how to darn, how to caulk a leaky window, how to take apart a stubborn bit of machinery and oil it back into action. No more. One reason is the globalisation of manufacturing. Speaking of late-stage capitalism, the abundance of cheap labour and low-cost materials overseas means an abundance of cheap goods that us consumers find hard to resist. When you can get a tee shirt on Temu for five bucks or a blender from Kmart for 30 bucks, you’re going to buy another one, not spend the time or the money to fix the one you have. The result is a terrible feedback loop of cheap junk that isn’t worth repairing that breaks only to be replaced by more cheap junk that isn’t worth repairing.
Then there’s the fact that modern goods, as well as being crappy, are complicated. For example, when I was a teenager, I had a 1958 Volkswagen Beetle. The engine was in the back, and when you opened the boot you could see it there, in all its visible, simple glory: there was the crank shaft, there were the spark plugs, there was an air hose. I was a 17-year-old dumbass who didn’t know anything about cars, but even I could often tell what was wrong just by looking. Have you popped the hood of a Tesla? There is nothing recognisable in there. Same goes with washing machines, bicycles (don’t get me started on Bluetooth-enabled shifting) and those smart fridges that track your eating habits, as if that is something anyone wants. Even worse, over the years producers have used more and more strategies to inhibit repairability. These range from incorporating proprietary parts like specific screws or glues or wiring, requiring the use of authorised repairers, not manufacturing spare parts, and copywriting repair manuals. Tech products can come with “software locks”, which might, say, disable your printer when it reaches the end of its pre-programmed service life, even if it’s working perfectly.
It’s not surprising most of us won’t even try to fix something, because we don’t have the skills (or we think we don’t), or we can’t get the right parts, or there’s a scary “if you even breathe on this you will void the warranty” sticker next to every bolt.
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The good news is that global consumers are starting to push back. For example, the idea of a legal “right to repair” is gaining traction. In 2024, the European Union adopted the Ecodesign Directive, which requires that products are designed to be repairable, and the Right to Repair Directive, which directs producers to offer transparent, affordable and timely repair services, including beyond the legal guarantee period. In Aotearoa, more than 21,000 people signed a Consumer NZ petition demanding repairability labels on household appliances and electronic devices; these would indicate how long a product is expected to last and how repairable it is. Currently, Aotearoa is the only country in the OECD without some form of e-waste regulation, and we throw away almost 100,000 tonnes of e-waste annually (that’s 20 kilograms per New Zealander per year).
But this may be changing. The Consumer Guarantees Act (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill, created by Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson, is due its first reading. The bill would update the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 (CGA) and require that manufacturers aim to ensure a supply of spare parts, supply information, tools and software (hello, Tesla) for diagnosing and repairing goods, and allow non-authorised parts and repairers to be used. As Marama explained, the idea is to combine climate action with cost-of-living relief. “The longer we can keep products in use, the less emissions and waste pollution we produce in manufacturing and transporting new products. … It would be a strong step towards building the circular economy we need to sustain a healthy planet and liveable climate.”
The feel-good factor
When it comes to fixing things, we just don’t back ourselves. I had a revelation about this when I moved to a rural area after a lifetime of living in cities. It may sound like a frontier-society cliche, but isolation makes you handy, by necessity. There isn’t a plumber up the road, and you can’t pop to the appliance store to pick up a new fridge. Online shopping has changed this to a point, but rural courier delivery is patchy and rural postal rates prohibitive. Since moving out of the city, I have fixed many things myself ̶ a busted toilet, a jammed stove knob, holey jeans ̶ that my urban self would have outsourced. Number 8 wire and all that.
Wānaka Wastebusters communications coordinator Ruth Blunt refers to this “confidence” barrier a lot. The Wastebusters’ Repair Revolution sessions grew out of Resourceful Communities funding from the Ministry of Environment. The money helped cover a two-year pilot aimed at engaging the community in waste minimisation, and the team also did a community survey to find out about reuse and repair in the region. According to Ruth, one message that came back was, “I don’t know where to get things fixed or how to fix them”. So Wastebusters decided to fix that.
The first Wānaka Repair Revolution event ran in September of 2020 and by mid-2024, more than 1200 items had been given a second life with the help of Repair Revolution volunteers. That’s a lot of stuff. Duncan, who at 12 is one of Wastebusters’ youngest repairers, first came with his mum and now volunteers regularly as a “taker apart of things”. Duncan told us about a “broken” vacuum cleaner that, upon disassembly, turned out to just be clogged with dust. Have a pause before you throw something in a landfill that’s still going to be there when your grandkids’ children have children. You might just have dirt in your filter.
Sustainability aside, it turns out repairing is a bringer of joy, too. “There’s a dopamine hit in doing a beautiful repair,” Ruth says. “There’s a feel-good factor in being able to take care of yourself and your stuff.” She remembers a seven-year-old who brought in a favourite toy, Wally the Walrus, and was thrilled to sew the flipper back on themselves. A life lesson for our times. And Dave Pickard, a volunteer upholsterer, recently helped a couple with a threadbare stool. They brought in new fabric, and he showed them how to do it themselves. “The smiles were epic. I love the ‘I did it’,” Ruth says.
Fixing the future
Repair Cafés date to October 2009, when the Dutch journalist and sustainability advocate Martine Postma set one up in West Amsterdam as an experiment. The idea was to provide a space with both tools and materials, as well as volunteers with expert knowledge, to facilitate repairs. Her concept has since become a global movement. As she told Resource Recycling magazine last year, “I particularly like to see the success of Repair Cafés as evidence that the world is ready for change, and that there is support for a transition to a more sustainable economy … the linear economy is simply not good enough and must be replaced by a more sustainable, circular model.”
New Zealand’s first Repair Café took place in 2013. It was a small-town affair, run at Diamond Harbour School by the Lyttelton Harbour Timebank as part of the Kura Festival of Learning. Events started to pop up all over the country, and in 2020 a national body, Repair Café Aotearoa New Zealand (RCANZ), was officially launched. Today, RCANZ works to support the growing number of repair cafés popping up around the country and to support communities who want to set up their own repair events. The goal is a nationwide ecosystem of fixing and fixers, and they now support more than 75 repair cafés around the country, with more starting up all the time. Whanganui’s first repair café kicked off in May of this year, attracting 100 people, about half of whom brought something to be repaired by one of 13 volunteers (these included a 40-year-old juicer and a garden fork dating to the 1970s).
As Ruth points out, it’s volunteers that are the heart of the thing. In Wānaka, Ruth calls Lorna Schmidt, who has been volunteering with Wastebusters’ Repair Revolution since the start, an “epic sewist”. Her love of sewing started when a teacher nominated her to design a doll’s dress for a school competition. She won. Later, frustrated by the lack of practical outdoor gear for women, she made her own trousers, and soon found friends asking for their own. “Over the years, she’s patiently guided attendees of all ages—some as young as three—through their first pins, stitches, and mends.”
Volunteerism is brilliant, but for a permanent wide-reaching shift to happen, manufacturers themselves need to be on board too. There are a number of companies who are showing enthusiasm about extending the life cycle of their products. Patagonia New Zealand, for example, has a repair programme. They can perform minor fixes on-site in their shops and have a mail-in repair service. Cactus Outdoors offers in-house repairs like patching, zip replacement and hole tacking for a reasonable fee, and Mons Royale sells $10 cuff repair kits for their merino tops. You can DIY it, or bring your Mons cuffs along to a repair café and have a chat with the sewers.
If you can afford it, use your wallet as a change agent. Do a bit of research before you buy, support companies with sustainable repair policies, and avoid gamified-discount-shopping hellscapes like Temu. (No one is judging you if you can’t. Sometimes living a sustainable life is a matter of privilege.)
The ultimate set of tools
In the classic 1982 coming-of-age film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jeff Spicoli, the perpetually-blitzed surfer played by Sean Penn, crashes a Chevy Camaro belonging to his mate’s perpetually-angry, and very large, football player brother. “Relax,” Spicoli says. “My old man is a television repairman, he’s got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.” There’s a lot that feels dated about Fast Times at Ridgemont High today, but it’s the television repairman dad that maybe stands out the most.
Still, events like the Wastebusters Repair Revolution get-togethers are a reminder that we do still have the tools. Today, a four-decade-old shoe rack left the Wānaka Community Workshop restored and ready to be lined with loafers, a broken vase was filled with flowers again, and a busted coffee machine went back to brewing. And Ruth is grinning. “There’s an inherent joy in fixing a thing that you love,” she says. Isn’t there just.
WORDS: LAURA WILLIAMSON
PHOTOS: Orla Ó’Muirí
