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.
This
is the Reading Repair Cafe, part of a burgeoning international
network aimed at confronting a world of stuff, of white goods
littering dumps in west Africa and trash swilling through the oceans
in huge gyres.
The
hair clippers belong to William, who does not want to give his
surname but cheerfully describes himself as “mechanically
incompetent”. He has owned them for 25 years, but 10 years ago they
stopped working and they have been sitting unused in his cupboard
ever since.
By
Kate Lyons
