Facts first: Over 10.000 tons of waste are shipped to chinese garbage dumps every single day. 3,5 million tons of waste do people alltogether produce everyday on earth. Despite of recycling our garbage production increases, we simply buy too much and more and more people on earth emulates the western lifestyle of consumption. Scientist Daniel Hoornweg estimates, that we will have 11 million tons of waste everyday in 2100, he wrote in the journal “Nature”. World champions are not China, it’s Germany, the USA, Canada and basically all western industralized countries – who wonders. In the seas environmental activists observes swirls of garbage and are highly concerned. One fifth of all corals are already gone. Waste is a serious issue.
And here is a habit that can solves so many problems at the same time. Don’t throw things away when they break. Try to repair it. Recently the handle of my pot got loose and apparently break. Fortunately it was one of the oldfashioned ones, where the handle is fixed with stainless steeled kettle with an ordinary screw. My wife put the broken handle aside and we used the pot with just one handle. Somehow we got used to it and we almost threw the abandoned handle away. This is the first step of waste production: We declare things as waste. But waste is not a law or a natural consequence. Waste is a cultural definition. You can throw paper away, when written on the one side, and declare it as waste. But you can also declare it as a ressource for anything: Maybe for notes or for crowdbooks (I will tell you another day, what the idea behind this is). So waste is a question of attitude not a question of functionality.
I found the screw and tried to fix the handle to the pot. Actually I have left all my screwdrivers at the Unreal Estate House (this is another idea, that I will explain later). All I have found was a cross bit, and fortunately this bit turned out to be the perfect tool to fix the handle, because a screwdriver would be too big anyway. And here is what happens after have fixing the handle: I was deeply satisfied.
“Repairing makes happy!” the Munich based physician Wolfgang Heckl says. Heckl runs the Technical Museum andmeets his friend Ulrich Walter – an astronaut – each saturday and they bring up lovely nice devices from the fleamarket and try to repair them: TVs from the sixties, electric toothbrushes, phono devices and so on. Just for fun.
And they start to philosophize about past convictions. And basically it’s about cultivating social networks. You can do that in a pub or in shopping mall, but you can also do it in a repair café. The repair café is a dutch invention and today counts hundreds of supporters worldwide. Here you find a map to get connected to the repair café in your
area.
Source:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/geplanter-verschleiss-von-produkten-reparieren-macht-gluecklich-1.1659903