BY BILL PICTURE
San Mateo County’s Office of Sustainability has partnered with the Berkeley-based nonprofit Fixit Clinic to host an ongoing series of drop-in workshops where people can learn how to fix the broken items taking up space in garages, closets and cabinets.
“The idea of fixing something versus just throwing it away is actually really old-fashioned, isn’t it,” said Avana Andrade, a sustainability specialist San Mateo County. “But it’s come full circle, and I think we need to find a way to make more environmentally friendly things like this hip and cool.”
She’s right about the old-fashioned part. Most of us probably can’t remember the last time we dug the toolbox out of the closet (if we even own a toolbox) to try to fix something around the house. The truth is, since the advent of disposable tableware in the 1950s, we’ve developed a “just throw it away and get a new one” attitude that workshop organizers say has proven detrimental to society in more ways than one.
Inspiring a return to the fix-it culture of the past may ease the strain on the environment of the endless stream of consumer waste, some of it hazardous. It may also help build community and get folks using their noggins again.
Why not toss it?
For starters, every repaired blender, bicycle or who-knows-what is one less item that ends up in a local landfill. You can’t get more environmentally friendly than that. According to Fixit Clinic founder Peter Mui, about 70 percent of the items that people bring with them to the clinics get fixed.
Though deeply rooted in the Bay Area, Fixit Clinic has developed into a bona fide movement, with a few dozen workshops popping up all over the country. Nationally, the clinics divert roughly 1,000 pounds of reparable items from the waste stream each year.
Mui points out that this impressive diversion rate is achieved with zero support from manufacturers, which isn’t surprising consider a company’s bottom line benefits more from an item being replaced than it does from an item being repaired.
“We have no access to manufacturers’ repair parts, diagnostic tools or service manuals,” he said. “We’re just applying critical thinking skills, and hands-on troubleshooting.”
And that brings us to another benefit of fixing household items—the aforementioned noggin part. “It’s the experience of exploration,” said Andrade.
Fixit Clinic puts loaned tools in the hands of aspiring fixers; then volunteer coaches, many of them retirees with decades of invaluable technical know-how in their back pockets, guide fixers through the process of taking apart a broken item, examining its guts to figure out what the problem is, and then repairing it.
It’s often like a puzzle with lots and lots of pieces. Solving that puzzle often strengthens problem-solving muscles to help with all sorts of everyday situations. The Fixit Clinic website very appropriately describes its workshops as “education, entertainment, empowerment, elucidation, and, ultimately, enlightenment through guided disassembly of your broken stuff.”
As another benefit, working together—even if “together” means simply being in the same room with other people trying to fix their own broken stuff—has a way of bringing people together in other ways. People seeking knowledge come together with other knowledge-seekers and they’re partnered with knowledge-holders; and the whole thing happens in an environment that’s friendly and supportive.
“It’s a party environment,” said Andrade. And friendships organically blossom between people who might have nothing else in common but a DIY inclination.
“All sorts of people come to the clinics; and amazing connections get made,” Andrade said. “It’s a beautiful thing, for instance, to see mature folks who were part of a generation that would sooner fix something than throw it out sharing knowledge with a generation that’s much more into computers and virtual-everything.”
Price vs. Quality
If 70 percent of the items brought to Fixit Clinics get repaired, that means 30% do not. “Some things just aren’t manufactured in way that they can be fixed,” said Andrade. “Cheap appliances like toasters are a good example. The parts needed to repair a broken toaster are very specific, and the manufacturers don’t make those parts available.”
Mui believes consumers share the blame for this. The notion that anything new is preferable to something used or repaired is a big issue to contend with, he said, as is the idea that throwing something in the trash is free.
“We are fighting an uphill battle against our shared collective identity as consumers and the associated idea that our consumption is what fuels economic growth and prosperity,” he said.
Through the disassembly and troubleshooting process, Mui hopes to help fixers shake their “new is better” attitude by helping them recognize what a short lifespan many of today’s products are actually intended by design to have. In turn, he hopes to inspire a more conscious and sustainable approach to both purchasing and design.
“Our Fixit Clinics at colleges and universities use the way things are designed now to inform the next generation of practitioners—engineers and designers—how to design for durability, maintainability and serviceability,” he said.
At first glance, the items people lug with them to Fixit Clinics might appear ordinary, but Andrade says the stories attached to these items are anything but boring. “There’s a reason people have been holding onto these items,” she said. “They mean something to them.”
“A couple recently brought in a waffle iron that they’d received as a wedding gift,” she adds. “To anyone else, it might just look like a waffle iron, but for them it had meaning. More often than not, these are items people care a lot about. It’s never just stuff.”
The next Fixit Clinic happens March 21 at the Millbrae Library. For more information, visit https://www.smcsustainability.org/events/.
