Re-Use and Repair
What the Bower does could be described as life extension for household
items.The Bower actively encourages a repair culture within the community.
In the past we have done so through educating with skills workshops, fostering
artistic opportunities, promoting re-use craft, and seeking design ideas for re-
invention of waste items.
Nowadays we have consignees who put to use their good craftsmanship and turn
something battered and bruised to classic or chic.
Repair culture
For those of us at the Bower, re-use is only one side of reducing waste. Repair is
its twin. Re-used items still in the crappy condition in which they were disposed
are all too likely to be returned to the waste stream soon. But a repaired item,
hinges working, wonky legs set straight and true, have extended lives with their
new custodians. The longer items stay out of the waste stream, the better.
Of course, there is more to repair culture than mending. For us, repair is an
extended word, meaning to restore, to renew, to renovate, and applies not only
to the materiality of an object, but abstract notions like strength and health.
In our grandparent's generation, manufactured items were used over and over
again. Labour was cheap, but resources were expensive. Waste dumps from their
days were rather light on re-usable items. And transformation was a natural
expression....44-gallon drums became rotund kitchen cupboards, kerosene tins
seemed to be anything but kerosene tins (food storage, chook nests, wall liners,
cookers). The same applies today in many countries labelled third-world
economies.
Values
We look to their inventiveness as an inspiration for the revival of a repair culture,
where to throw something useful "away" was (and will be) morally culpable
("waste not, want not", whatever its origin, is not a modern expression). But we
have to recognise that our western society, having broken out of earlier cycles of
scarcity, has hardly had the time to culturally adjust to the era of post-scarcity.
The values of consumption rule in an economy that has, across less than two
generations, assembled the largest collection of non-durable, non-repairable
items outside of an official war munitions economy. And these items are intended
to last only for cycles of consumption. These can be limited by material
obsolesence (chipboard or melamine disintegration, nearly always irreparable),
technological obsolesence (analogue phones, x86 computers, and soon analogue
TVs) or cultural obsolesence (fashion, web consciousness, games processing
needs, graphic sophistication).
Values of mass consumption are conspicuousness, fashion, convenience,
replicability, disposability, the pose of originality brought about by simply being
the first to "own".
The only escape is to re-invest different values into the cycle of consumer
production. It is this reconfiguration of values that forms the core of "repair
culture".
Intervening in the product life-cycle is one step...halting the conveyor belt to
landfill of the disposable and rethinking instead its final destination. This is re-
use, part I: the disposed item is redelivered to another consumer with values (or
needs) that differ from the disposer. A table becomes a desk, a family fridge
becomes a second or "beer" fridge, or the state-of-the-art finance computer
becomes the kids email and homework machine.
Another intervention is that of "repair". One aspect of this is to restore to
serviceability an item that has been thrown out because it no longer works as it
should (the chairleg is broken, the turntable won't turn, the cupboard door won't
open and close) Intervention here is good for social values, as care must be
applied to such items to maintain their life, and care is a positive emotion to
invest. Ultimately, repair must extend to the entire ecosystem.
The other intervention crosses barriers relating to industrial mass production.
"Repairing" waste items by reconfiguring the meaning of their parts, turning circuit boards into bookends or CD
racks and pet food tins into handbags, a fridge into a food-smoker, a railway trolley into a coffee table, bike cogs
into a garden seat. When this intervention takes place, the output is more of the nature of a handmade than
industrial commodity. Rather than the object transforming dramatically (the components often remain visible),
what happens is that different values are built in to objects by "repair". These values are to do with usefulness and
endurance, with skill and craftsmanship, with creativity and uniqueness, subtlety, humour, pertinence, and with
care and pride. There is no necessity for craft to rely upon primary resources to manufacture, only upon resources
that can be modified.
Relationships
When these values spread to and are taken up by sections of the community, interesting things begin to happen.
Labour becomes positive (many "repairers" spend hours almost every day at "work", enjoying themselves), skip bins
begin to fill with possibilities rather than refuse, creativity emerges without art classes, fresh skills are sought out,
as they extend one's capabilities, originality emerges across the face of industrial mass consumption. New
relationships are made, where co-operation becomes the key to completing restorative works, or where one
person's project answers another's need uniquely. No-one from inside the repair culture could morally avoid the
responsibility towards an item facing disposal that has "potential" to be re-used in some form. Such items are either
kept for use, re-use, re-invention, or, in the rational economy emerging, are placed in the system of re-use centres
like the Bower for distribution.
Now these changes will not end waste, nor will they make the major contribution towards ending waste. But
discussions of the waste reduction hierarchy has placed far too much emphasis upon "Reduce" and "Recycling",
which still leave intact relationships (and in the case of recycling even the values) between production and mass
consumption.
The ideas of re-use within a "repair culture" transform on so many levels. Consumption is reduced because raw
materials and commodities are replaced; recycling is encouraged because responsibility is accepted for materials
that pass through our custodianship; re-use becomes an inventive game, full of possibility.
