Slashdot Mirror
The Dutch Repair Cafe Versus the Throwaway Society
circletimessquare writes "Everyone in the modern world has thrown away at least one thing that was perfectly good except for an easily fixed defect, because it's just easier to buy a new one. In the Netherlands, in the name of social cohesion, and with government and private foundation grants, there is a trend called the Repair Cafe (Dutch). People bring in broken items: a skirt with a hole in it, an iron that no longer steams, and they fix each other's stuff and meet their neighbors. Now that's an idea worth keeping."
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people. The same is true for Asians and Australians too. And the American people introvert culture isn't a new thing that came with computers - they did this before geeks too. Sitting in front of TV watching mindless shows and eating TV dinners, alone.
One great geeky example about Americans making artificial social walls around them is how quick companies were to replace LAN gaming with online gaming so that you could sit alone and not interact with people. I live in asia and when people play games, they go play them with friends to internet cafes. There's a place near me where there is always young guys gaming together. There's a huge cultural difference between US and the rest of the world.
As the saying goes - "We have the technology, we can build anti-social walls around us!"
I'm more than happy to do pc repairs and exchange services with friends, right now one friend helps with mechanical issues with my car and I take care of their computers.
It's a great idea.
We throw away perfectly working pieces of tech. Thing accumulate around the house and just become clutter to be picked up and tossed during a spring cleaning. The problem is that newer tech makes it so that almost no one even wants old laptops and such. Then there is the risk that there is something person stuck somewhere inside and you have to spend extra effort clearing it completely to be safe if you want to give it away. I have an old laptop sitting around that I have run some clean up tools on and I'm still not quite ready to put it up on Freecycle. We really need better recycling programs for old Phones, batteries, etc. People are going to just want something new when the new thing is 100x better than the old thing even if the old thing still works.
Things are generally made extremely cheaply these days, and are not designed for repair, so it does make things a bit more difficult than it used to be. In many cases there are tear-down videos and instructions for things available on the internet, so I think this balances out nicely. It's a great chance to learn how things work and teach other as well. I'd really like to see this done in North America, perhaps as a school fund-raising project or something.
The Americans have had a go but just made things worse. Any chance some of this Dutch magic will help?
This would be a great idea for a Makerspace trying to attract more people/funding.
You've already got tools and a core of tinkerers that know how to fix stuff -- if you could draw in a broader audience from the community, you could make some extra money selling them drinks and munchies, and possibly convert some people to the hobby.
It was done because it offers you the ability to play with people in either scenario, no matter how far away they were.
No. Local play was replaced by internet play because it was seen as more profitable by the games industry to enforce DRM online.
If it were truly about adding features, LAN / local play would still be enabled on Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games.
The real problem is with lifecycle sustainability.
If raw material sourcing is sustainable, and disposal is as well, then there is no problem with the "throwaway" culture. The "throwaway" culture frees up repairmen to pursue more useful or enjoyable things by using machines to alleviate their burden.
Technology is a separate issue. As technology gets better and better, why should we spend so much repairing it? The recent advances in reducing power consumption and doing more processing in hardware is a good thing. Getting rid of a several year old computer is like getting a gas guzzling junker off the road.
The ecological aversion to the "throwaway" culture comes from a time where reuse and repair was seen as necessary to the inherent unsustainable sourcing and landfill disposal. Once those problems are addressed we must reexamine our assumptions about the value of reuse and repair.
It's a sad fact of life that in the U.S. it is often cheaper to replace something than it is to repair it. With electronics you have the added penalty that you're often repairing something that's now slower than the replacement.
A sign of our times
I was babysitting a 5 year old in high school and she had this alphabet book of professions. U = upholsterer. She asked me what that was. I told her it was someone who repaired or replaced the fabric on your couch. She asked me why you didn't throw it out and get a new one. That it didn't even occur to her that someone might want to try to fix something rather than just dump it in a landfill somewhere really struck me.
I remember a slashdotter telling about something similar in germany, where you can come into a shop where the rent you the tools, and you fix the stuff there and then. It also acted as an edutainment, with people coming in to watch and learn.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
A missing button, a broken vase, a bent prong on a plug - sure. But most of the things we throw out are broken beyond repair. A white shirt with a large coffee stain that won't bleach out is pretty much over and done as a shirt, and can safely be downgraded to "wipe rag." The last pair of jeans I gave up on had an inseam that had split right down the middle. Even with a patch, even with me re-sewing the seam, they were still structurally degraded. Ever have a seam split in public? It's pretty embarrassing. That said, I didn't actually throw the jeans away - I cut the panels free and saved the scraps without holes in them for quilting.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.
I've lived in America and the Netherlands, Americans do that just as much as the Dutch. Go into any large city and visit bars and restaurants, you'll find them plenty crowded with people socializing.
What is somewhat true is that the Dutch watch less TV, but they do other things around the house too.
People in general are social and like to go out. People with families stay in more because it's harder to go out with children. That does not really change much across cultures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Take for instance an electric iron. It might just be clogged up from hard water deposits that could be removed with some solution like CLR or LimeAway. The problem is, in order to get to the parts that are clogged you have to deal with sonic welding, adhesives and fasteners that were designed to be one-way. The only way to disassemble the unit is to break it and glue it back together, which is not very elegant nor safe when dealing with mains current plus heating elements.
Same thing goes for about 90% of small electric appliances today. They are not designed to be repairable.
Most of this is not so much cultural as others have pointed out but it all comes down to the cost of labor. At one time in the US decorative scrollwork in homes was hand-carved. The craftsman doing the work made maybe $0.25 a day which for the time wasn't all that bad but it was by no means extravagant. It would be comparable to what any common laborer would get paid or someone clerking in a store.
Today, to have someone skilled in wood carving come to your home and do some work would be easily $200 an hour. An experienced technician wouldn't be getting that individually, but you can figure a company in the business of appliance repair is going to be charging at least $100 an hour. Which makes a $30 electric iron absurd to even consider repairing - it would cost $30 for someone to spend 20 minutes on it. Even larger appliances begin to reach the point where it makes no sense to repair them simply because of the cost of labor. Why spend $200 to fix a washing machine that cost $250 to replace?
Where things get really confused is in the 1800s and early 1900s the US saw significant immigration from Europe of craftsmen and skilled workers. Someone that spent 20 years making fine furniture would come to the US and could find immediate work basically doing the same sort of thing for at least as much money if not more. Today, we have huge low-skill immigration which skews the wage scale in interesting ways. In some parts of the country it is cheaper to hire more people (immigrant labor) using hand tools to do a job than it is to use power tools or other modern assists with fewer people. This only works in low-skill areas, though. If the US had a huge number of immigrants coming in that were skilled electronics technicians or computer programmers it would be quite different.
What we have now is it is cheaper to hire five people to use hand tools to do landscaping work than one person with a power mower. But it is also cheaper to replace a $800 TV than it is to bring it to a technician to look at it because his labor is incredibly expensive. The US today is a confused mess of labor rates that will end up sorting itself out in the end, but likely as not things will shift to the low end of the scale.
If you repair some electrical device for someone else, and at some point down the line it starts a fire or electrocutes someone, you could easily be held liable here in the US, whether your repair had anything to do with it or not. And half-assed repairs done by well-meaning but untrained people are just BEGGING for trouble. From the NYT article (emphasis mine):
When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over â" no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. He plugged the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went on. Rusty water poured out. Finally, it began to steam.
Actual repair shops carry insurance for such eventualities, but random folks at a "repair cafe" wouldn't.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Complementary to your comment, we have a lot of tech that was created so long ago that it's terribly inefficient and should best be retired. Consider an old machine with an Athlon 1200 CPU, drawing 330 watts of power while an Intel i5-2400 based machine draws only 75 watts. Consider an old hard drive that draws 30 watts to spin at idle, compared to a modern drive that uses 8 watts to do the same, or a SSDD that draws 0.14 watts. Or consider a CRT monitor drawing 120W compared to a newer LCD that draws 22W.
Yes, I get that obviously there are things that people can't afford to replace today, and when repairing them for free is an option, it'll happen. But these old devices still cost them tremendously on their electric bills. I believe the Dutch pay somewhere around $0.40/kWh, meaning that an old PC there would cost over $4 per day to run, compared to a new efficient machine that would cost less than $1 per day. And that new machine would certainly have better performance, more capabilities, and likely better security (not that I want to get into a big debate about it, but running Windows 7 and IE 9 instead of XP and IE 6 would be a big improvement for most home user's security.)
Some working things should be retired.
John
Creating a new item on an assembly line is generally cheaper than trying to repair it.
Not exactly. If you consider the amount of energy, resources and environmental impact that goes int into producing a toaster:
Steel parts: mine ore, haul ore, melt it (blast furnace), machining
Plastic parts: crude oil, refining, pelletizing, melting, extrusion and molding.
In the end, you need to package and ship everything to a warehouse, then ship it to a store or directly to a customer which takes fuel and produces more greenhouse gas. A simple repair eliminates all of this. People just don't consider the big picture because most of them can't see past the shelf in Walmart.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
socializing with my friends, but the truth is after two jobs and 14 hours of work im too tired. my second job, customer service, makes me cranky and irritable by the time i get home and honestly ive spent so much time sitting under fluorescent lights and talking to people about their medical bills id rather stay in anyway.
on the weekends i normally get stuck with TPS reporting, and its not like i can duck out of that because im a salaried employee. besides, this is building equity. i hope.
sometimes on holidays i get off, christmas or the occasional tuesday morning im not working at the baltimization plant, i go to this cafe down the street. the cafe i go to has lots of people in it, but the unspoken rule is that we all have to be quiet and we have to drink their coffee to use the wireless for exactly one hour. I mean, nobody is doing any meaningful work at a cafe its all mostly facebook and minecraft but the possibility still exists that someone is working out a spreadsheet on their ipad and so we're all quiet.
wednesday when i go back to work and realize i also picked up a bartending shift to help pay down my college loans and the loan for the dental work i had done, i get a chance to socialize with people that are drunk. so i guess that counts. by 4 am though im still tired.
ive tried planning things with my friends, but they spend most of their time at work too.
Good people go to bed earlier.
http://raisedonhoecakes.com/ROH/2012/04/12/your-son-has-been-arrested-for-being-able-to-fix-a-lacrosse-stick/
Try and fix certain electronics governed by the FCC. There are other things that are made less functional to conform to regulations.
I fixed my custom DVR by delivering the feed over Component video and re-encoding it. I'm sure that's illegal too...
There aren't enough of them to cover all the diverse things that might need repair for this to be a practical business model anymore, at least for most things. Bicycles and cars are notable classes of exceptions.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Actually, I think that the rise of internet gaming VS LAN gaming has several factors, few of them due to being antisocial. I still do LAN game but play online as well at times
The bad...
a) Convenience: Pack up your oversized gaming PC, monitor etc. Drag them to somebody's house, possibly popping a few vertebra hauling crap around. Plug into power for 3 daisy-chained power bars and an ethernet cable that is just a bit too short. Pop a few breakers until you figure out who plugs in where. After an hour you might actually get things ready to play.
b) Availability: Try and figure out what you're all going to play. Six of us want to play Shooter Game X, but Bob only wants to play RTS's. Everyone finally agrees on game Y, except John who doesn't have it and needs to install/download. By the time John installs, everyone else has played up and is moving on to another game
c) Play games on a LAN that still need an internet connection. Lag occurs. People get dropped, and even though you're all trying to play with only those in your room, hackerKid239 joins the game and headshots every one of you within 2.5 seconds whilst insulting your mom
d) Several makes of various shapes and sizes drinking, eating greasy food, and fit into a small poorly ventilated room. 'nuff said
The good...
a) Social: You get to visit with your buds, have a few drinks perhaps etc. While loading you can trade funny youtube clips or photoshopped pictures of Bob's wife
b) Private LAN games: For games that actually allow it, being able to play with your buds and *NOT* hackerKid239 is fun
c) Trading: Although arguments over what to play may arise, you get to see what other cool games people in your group have. Rather than spending 5h downloading, buy the game in steam and then snag the install files from a USB drive being passed around
Because to repair an item, you would have to first reverse engineer the item to understand how it works. This is specifically prohibited by the DMCA, and you could face a civil lawsuit, criminal penalties and jail time/fines.
In the USA it is ILLEGAL to understand how a product works. You're not allowed to fix stuff, only to consume, and obey.
Remember what country you live in folks, we're just trying to protect you. Now, please strip naked so you can board the subway.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Philip K dick had a story where this was essentially part of the plot line -- a man from the past arrives in the future and is able to actually...fix things (The Variable Man)
In one scene, children are playing with a toy and it gets broken. The main character starts to fix it and the kids are wondering what he is doing and why he doesn't just throw it out and get a new one.
The book is free on Project Gutenburg here
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
As a hobby, I repair old Teletype machines, from the 1920s and 1930s. These machines were designed for a long life of nearly continuous operation and to be repairable. I have 70 and 80 year old machines running. Everything unscrews (and every screw has a lock nut), everything is interchangeable, and all parts can be reached without dismantling too much. The detailed repair manuals still exist. If one of these machines hasn't been seriously damaged and has all the parts, it's usually repairable. This is as good as it gets in repairability.
The price of this is weight, bulk, and routine maintenance. The frame is cast steel. A printer weighs about 75 pounds, about twice the weight of an electric typewriter. There are over 500 oiling points to be oiled annually, plus about 50 points that require greasing. Every few years of operation, a full cleaning is required. This involves removing the two electrical parts, the motor and the selector electromagnet, and soaking the entire machine in solvent. Western Union did this to their machines routinely.
Then there are adjustments. There are spring tensions and clearances to be adjusted. A spring scale and a feather gauge are required. After any part replacement, there are adjustments to be performed according to the manual.
Nobody would put up with that bulk, weight, and maintenance today to get a machine capable of decades of operation. That is the price of repairability.
I ran into a few good tellings-off too. Due to some mental health issues, I felt compelled to repair things at school. I couldn't leave something broken, so I always had a few tools on me. Screwdrivers, multitool, tape, glue. The only reason I didn't get expelled was that the school had a unit specialising in supporting students with such issues, and the teachers there were willing to argue strongly on my behalf.
This is a very cool idea, and there are plenty of things that are fixable, but it doesn't help that corporate interest favors products that are not repairable. There is much more money to be made when you can convince or force consumers to buy new. A throwaway society consists of those who buy the throwaways, and those who sell the throwaways.
While this repair cafe is a single cafe in the country, there's a whole community of second hand shops called Kringloopwinkels. I my town of 116.000 people there are about 9 shops like that. The one I worked at was the biggest, with 2 physical shops and more than 1.000.000 Euro sales. They employ about 85 people, of whom maybe 45 or 50 have a paid job.
It's quite a big business, and even with a recession it's a growing business.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
In the US you've got a society that's designed from the ground up to benefit big business. The US is also unquestionably the most powerful country on earth and (practically) owns the world. The US is also one of the most open societies in the world and one of the largest, geographically. The predominant school of thought among social engineers and social planners in the US, is that the population must be highly indoctrinated (and the US population IS higly indoctrinated). The Netherlands really only compares to the US in the openness of its society. Given those facts, you can't compare the US and Dutch people. If you think those facts shouldn't affect people's socilization, you're just not giving the subject enough thought. One example, and this will be a tad controversial; there's a reason the Netherlands enjoy ten political parties and the US has only two (that are basically the same party); What the people of the Netherlands think doesn't matter outside of the Netherlands. What the people in the US think matters a lot.
Just sacrifice the weirdo screws. Use metal tube, small enough to go down the hole and long enough to grip above the surface, for each screw. Mix a blob of epoxy putty and put a small cylindrical bead of it in each tube end. Put tubes in holes, ram the epoxy bead to form it to the screw top and to the inside of the tube. Go have a beer. When you come back, grab the tube top with any convenient pliers and turn the screws out. To reassemble, replace the screws with something standard.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
I often will use a Dremel to grind straight slots in uncooperative screw heads so I can use a regular flat blade screwdriver to remove them. This generally works well for stripped Philips head screws, too. And I've made specialty screwdrivers (triangles, two-pronged, etc.) by grinding the needed custom tips onto small pieces of barstock, but the soft metal generally isn't as durable as I need it to be. I have a few cases where I made those tools using a sacrificial screwdriver as the starting blank, but grinding the case-hardened tips usually results in a weak tool anyway.
I never thought about using epoxy to get at an otherwise inaccessible screw! And using a tube to contain the epoxy, preventing damage to the product itself, well, that's just amazingly clever! Thank you so much!
John
Poor people barter informally (and don't consider reporting it) and work for cash "under the table". They're rarely caught. Rich people have loopholes written for them. Only those in the middle have to pay. If a plumber barters for services an electrician, the IRS will never find out. If a lawyer does with his accountant, BAM!
(I guess the distinction is more blue-collar verus white than poor versus middle; plenty of plumbers have more money than plenty of accountants)