Breathing New Life into a Radio CD Player
Two and a half years ago, I bought a JVC combined DAB Radio & CD player from Currys. After 27 months of uninterrupted use, I returned home one day to find that the display was flashing, and the unit wouldn’t respond to the remote control or buttons. It was effectively dead. Currys explained that I was three months out of warranty and couldn’t help me. They advised me to throw it away and start again.
Last Saturday, I visited the Gosport Repair Café with my JVC player. They PAT tested it, and a very kind and efficient gentleman named Kevin took it apart to diagnose the problem. I was allowed to watch and even got a cup of tea. In the hall, I saw about a dozen other experts and a queue of people with various items, from a tent to a bike, all being disassembled and reassembled to prevent them from being thrown away.
While there, I spoke to Keith, the Chair of the Gosport branch. Keith shared some staggering statistics about the Repair Café UK. There are currently 252 Repair Cafés in the UK, and they’ve held 11,937 events, helping 84,284 people. In the process, they’ve fixed devices that prevent 268,527 kg of waste, which means they’ve prevented 2,426,391 kg of CO2 emissions.
It costs around £170 per event to run this service, and each person is encouraged (if they can afford it) to contribute £10 for the repair of their item. Unfortunately, Kevin concluded that my JVC had a damaged PCB and was beyond economic repair.
Despite the failure to repair my player, I enjoyed two things about the experience:
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It was heartening to see so many people who wanted to repair their items instead of throwing them away.
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All the people involved were engaging, experienced, and incredibly helpful.
I thanked them for a wonderful time (despite the repair failure) and paid my voluntary donation. I left feeling positive about the way some people are taking waste prevention seriously.
Kim Laws
