Have you ever had a door handle, chair, turntable, gadget, doohickey or thingamajig break down on you?
I’m guessing you have.
And I’m also guessing you’ve been quite displeased about it, and perhaps resigned yourself to throwing the darned thing in the trash and buying a new one.
The next time something breaks, though, try taking a closer look at why it’s broken. There’s a good chance you’ll find it can be fixed easily with simple tools and materials.
Environmental impact reduction times three
Most new stuff you buy will already have had an impact on the environment before it reaches you:
- A certain amount of energy has been spent to extract raw materials and manufacture it
- A certain amount of energy has been spent to transport it to you
This – along with the energy that is spent to disassemble, deconstruct or decompose it when you toss it out – is known as embodied energy.
Whenever you repair something instead of just trashing it, you’re effectively saving an equivalent of that product’s entire embodied energy.
No raw materials are extracted, no energy is spent manufacturing, nothing is spent transporting a new product to you and no energy is spent on disassembly etc.
And, since you no longer have to buy a new product, you’re saving money, too!
Fixing a camera with an eraser
Here’s an example of a cheap repair that saved some decent money and quite a bit of embodied energy.
My girlfriend’s camera was dropped on paving stones, and the useless little plastic latch keeping the battery in place broke off.
The camera was still fine in all other respects, but it was kind of awkward trying to get good pictures while using two fingers to hold the battery in place.
Typically enough, the camera importer’s service department said it would be more expensive to have the latch replaced than buying a new camera.
Spending hundreds of dollars on a replacement camera didn’t feel right. It was working just fine, after all, if it weren’t for the lack of that pesky piece of plastic.
I ended up gluing a small piece of eraser to the inside of the lid that covers the battery compartment. When the lid is closed, the eraser pushes the battery firmly into its slot (see picture below).
So now the only awkward part of taking pictures with that camera is me, whenever I’m in front of it 
You can’t repair everything with a bit of glue and an eraser, of course, but I still think it shows you can do a lot with a little.
For more inspiration on fixing broken stuff to save both the environment and money, you might want to take a look at the newly started but promising blog Fixin’ to be green.
Even better than fixing broken stuff is having stuff that don’t break in the first place. Check out my guest post on quality versus cost over at Pays to Live Green for more on that.
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This post was tagged with: broken camera, broken stuff, environmental impact, fixing, garbage, repairing, repairs, saving money, trash, waste
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Oh … that was a wonderful fix. One of the real benefits of trying to fix things before tossing them … a benefit besides the environmental impact that is … is that it really gets us back into a creative way of thinking … something that most of us have lost. And what a great feeling to know that we haven’t contributed to a landfill or the use of additional resources to get a “new one”. Brilliant!
Thanks for sharing!
Small Footprints
@Small Footprints: True about creative thinking. I’m fully convinced creativity can be trained, sort of like a muscle. The more you push yourself to use it (within reason), the stronger it gets.
That was a great idea with the eraser! So much better for the environmetn to fix things than to throw them away and buy new all the time. If you can fix them without using too much expensive, new matreials, that is – like a piece of eraser
@Daria: Yeah, that’s an important point – if you have to use expensive materials with a high embodied energy to fix something, it might be better to get a replacement instead. Luckily, most of the time you won’t need stuff like that for fixes