by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
I know this may sound a little strange and I am not talking about repairing the economy, for we need to change it not repair it, because it is not broken; it was designed that way.
The repair economy is something that we once, actually, had in the form of little workshops that were geared to repairing this and that, from shoes and clothes to radios, TVs, bicycles, and much more.
In the German Democratic Republic, that some people called and still insist in calling East Germany, or communist East Germany even, literally a whole sector of the economy was geared to repair. Not because things broke down easily for lack of quality – rather the opposite, things were designed to last – but because things were repairable and repair was a great deal cheaper than buying new. It was thus also, though repair shops and such were no officially counted as part of the economy, in other countries, including Britain, the USA, and elsewhere.
Nowadays, however, most of those repair shops – at least in the UK – are no longer with the exception of the high street shoe repair places who can just about glue a heel or a sole on but that is about all. Ask them to resew an upper to a leather midsole and they are utterly confused and lost (“I don't have a machine for that,” I was told).
But you will very rarely, if indeed, find the little shop where there will be a guy sitting there with a soldering iron fixing electrical goods, because most of those goods today either cannot be repaired, as they have been designed not to be repairable, or it is more expensive to have them repaired than to buy the same product new again. When a spare part for a computer printer, for instance, costs itself more than a new printer then we really have to question on what principle the economy is working. That is how we register economic growth. Oh, but I am digressing.
We must get back, though, to products that are made to last, that can be repaired and to the repair economy, the small and not so small businesses that specialize in repair. In addition to that we need the small makers back as well, but that is a different story.
But the way this is being promoted by some at the present, much like the so-called circular economy, is not going to deliver the real needs of this kind of economy because all too often the need for products that are made to truly last in the way they were once made is still not properly part of the equation. We must rethink our approach on many level and travel back to the future, so to speak.
We are still, in most talk about any kind of economy, fixated way too much on growth. Growth, the way our economy promoted it, an infinite one, is simply not possible on a finite Planet. Even the majority of proponent of a so-called “green economy” still keep incessantly talking about growth, about growing the economy.
By now we have exhausted and almost exhausted our non-renewable resources, and not just coal, oil and gas, but also metals, though the latter we can reclaim by proper recycling processes, and we are now hell for leather doing the same for rare earth and rare earth metals, be it cobalt, lithium and others for the batteries and other components for cellphones, e-vehicles, etc. and the extraction of at least cobalt and lithium causes environmental and human disasters.
We need to make a serious u-turn and we must make it now and return to the ways of old combined with the knowledge and technology that we have today to produce again in a sustainable way making things that last and that can be repaired, either by simple DIY-tinkering by user or, well, tinkerer, or in small workshops dedicated to undertake such repairs. The latter then creating a repair service economy or sector of the economy. Like with less waste production though using glass bottles and jars, for instance, and having refundable deposits on such containers or though collection of recyclables, only they were not called that then, by the rag-and-bone man, we have been there before and we must go there again.
© 2021
