One of the foundations of the Transition Town movement is reskilling — learning how to do the things that people used to know how to do in order to live. Repairing broken items is one of those skills, but how do you do it when the item in question was built to break and be unrepairable? (Having just thrown away 2 irons, I’m feeling this dilemma acutely.)
Check out this article about Repairware in Treehugger. If you have examples of easy-to-repair items, please post responses here.
Think of It As An Adventure 
I have a basement full of stuff I don’t want to put into the “recycling” stream, since recycling is itself energy intensive and who knows what third world country the left over waste will get dumped on, what children will suffer illness, what pregnancies will be compromised.
Why don’t we tax the large corporations to give money to small start up businesses that promise to create no waste. As in tools that can be fixed.
I have numerous horror stories to tell, such as about complete heating units that have to be thrown away because one KNOB is broken (cheap plastic). This sort of wanton waste should not be legal.
I would love to get together with people for a one time planning session to go to our local hardware stores, such as Welna I & II and see if we can work with them to supply high quality tools that can be repaired or reUSED.
We need our reUSE center back!! Maybe Welna & ACE can help us with this.
In the meantime, let’s camp out at the Capitol…start a garden on the Capitol Lawn!! Take back the money being hijacked from we, the people.
Thanks for the post.
PS: Quality tools need to be accessible to ALL people, not just what is left of the middle class.
(In my humble opinion, we should not be letting ANYone in this state have an income of more than $100,000 until EVERYONE has a living wage (not the minimum wage, which is so low, I would be embarrassed to pay it to a child),
Every child should have healthy food and safe places to play and create and roam. These state budget cuts are crimes against the citizens. We must not tolerate them.
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