Hello!
If you’ve been following any of our communications over the last 18 months (or those of our project partner Possible) you’ll know that we’ve been testing permanent repair in two Fixing Factories with support from the The National Lottery Community Fund.
One of these being the Brent Fixing Factory, run in partnership with West London Waste Authority based in a shipping container at a recycling centre. We refurbished and rehomed 206 laptops which were destined to become e-waste and ran 10 popular Dr.Laptop community repair sessions in libraries across Brent, fixing an additional 85 devices. This equals up to a whopping 44,371kg of prevented carbon emissions- the same amount of emissions as driving around the world just over 9 times- 369,758 km to be exact! We’ve been supported by an incredible 110 volunteers, including 22 young people who completed work experience with us, they contributed a huge 1270 hours of their time - this equals 169 working days!
Why can’t the Brent Fixing Factory stay open?
After reading about the impact we’ve had, you might be wondering why we’ve decided to close the Brent Fixing Factory…
At both Fixing Factory sites, we quickly saw the scale of public appetite for getting support to fix their things and seeing repair happening. We’ve seen huge public, institutional and public interest in having fixing spaces on our highstreets. By placing future Fixing Factories in high streets and other highly visible spaces, we could raise more awareness and do more to change how people think about repair.
Our training and work experience initiatives in Brent were always in demand, and we’ve seen that by teaching people how to repair, we can fix more things and keep more items in circulation. So future development of Fixing Factories will build on our experience at Brent helping people to learn to fix, we’ll just be in more visible spaces.
We know there’s still a need for initiatives to give laptops a second life, and the great news is there are loads of other fantastic organisations in London and beyond who you can still donate your devices to, find them onour map of computer reuse projects.
So, what’s next for us?
West London Waste Authority & The Restart Project will continue to work together and we are using the shipping container space at Abbey Road Reuse and Recycling Centre to host our upcoming laptop repair trainee course for young people.
The Camden Fixing Factory is still open. As this site matures we are exploring new offers which focus on skills development through our innovative Repair Clubs and the creation of bite sized workshops focusing on the repair of a range of small household electronic items such as toasters and hoovers. You can stay in the loop with what’s going on by subscribing to our newsletter or visiting fixingfactory.org/news.
To read the full blog post with more information, head to our website.