Repair

The 6 R's are Rethink, Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recyle and Repair; this week the focus is on Repair.

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The recycle now website states “UK households have an average of £4,000 worth of clothes - but 30% of those haven’t been worn in the last year”. Reducing your purchases by repairing your items reduces the energy and resources needed to make new items, reduces items going to landfill and also saves you money.

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Below are a few ideas for resources to help you fix broken items…

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Repair What You Wear – Fashion generates 10% of global carbon emissions, this free website has great tutorials for helping fix common reasons for throwing away clothes. 

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https://sewguide.com/clothing-repair-mending-tears/ This guide also gives different methods for repairing tears in fabric.

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Kintsugi repairing is a really quite gorgeous way of fixing up broken pottery. It is a centuries old method of fixing pottery with Kin (golden) tsugi (joinery) and appreciating the story of a piece rather than the perfection. There are a number of tutorials online and this one shows a couple of methods… https://www.invaluable.com/blog/kintsugi/

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Youtube can also be a good source for videos to help repair. If you search for your make and model of item possibly someone with have uploaded a video to help fix it. I’ve managed to fix my washing machine before – although it was a simple fix it would have taken a repair man to come out to help!

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If you think it is beyond you to fix how about looking for a repair café? These are springing up all over the country - we are lucky enough to have a great one in Macclesfield. You can check here to see if there is one local … https://www.repaircafe.org/en/visit/. Our local repair cafe can be found at Macc Repair Cafe | Macclesfield | Facebook. They fix all sorts including bikes, clothes and electrical goods all for a donation. 

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Could you have a go at repairing before throwing away?