Reduce, Reuse...Repair? ...by Sr. Dorothy

Life can be very busy in the 21^st century. So busy that we often feel we don’t have time to repair things—clothing, furniture, electronic equipment. We just need to keep going, so we throw away things that could be repaired—some of which we could repair ourselves—and buy new ones.

from Weaving Vectors by Vecteezy.com

This feeling of time pressure is very real, but not particularly new. Our ancestors didn’t have the “time-saving” equipment we rely on, but did everything manually: gardening, cooking, doing the dishes, making clothes, sewing and mending, laundry, planting, weeding, and harvesting the crops, building houses and barns…. And so on. You can bet there were never quite enough hours in the day.

People did repair clothing and machinery and the roof and fences, though. Few had enough resources to do otherwise, and they valued the things they had enough to take care of them over long periods.

But that was when makers of clothing and machinery and other things took pride in making things to last—and to be valuable enough to be repaired. Since then, we have become more a consumer society, and manufacturers have been making things with shorter useful lifetimes. There are still some manufacturers who pride themselves on making things to last and be repaired, and this is a hopeful sign.

We all have heard the phrase “reuse, reduce, recycle” in recent years with the object of saving money and reducing waste which fills up our landfills. From the European Union’s European Green Deal, we now hear also “refurbish and repair.” Take a look at https://www.mt-unirepair.com/the-right-to-repair-for-consumers-a-reaction-to-limit-the-climate-change/ which in addition addresses climate change and the “Right to Repair.”

from youtube.com video by MrPrintGuyDIY

I have not always taken the better way of repairing broken things, but when it seems within my skills, I do try. A number of years ago, I put a set of new rollers on a printer which is still going strong today. Recently I mended several wool socks by knitting patches on them. And just yesterday, I repaired an older printer by replacing the pickup roller. (Have you noticed how many things you can learn from youtube videos?) Computers can have their lives extended by converting the operating system from Windows to very light-footprint versions of Linux, which enable older computers to run much faster and be useful again.

Repairing things is one way to help ourselves and our world. Encouraging manufacturers to make things that last and can be repaired by buying their products is another. Talking to people we know is a good way to let them know what we're doing and perhaps inspire them too.