School of Sustainability

A bedside lamp and 619,873 repair attempts logged by volunteers

At Restart's most recent Repair Day event in London, a woman came in with a bedside lamp. The bulb holder, a plastic piece, had snapped. Replacing it, the team found, would mean cutting the lamp in two, and there was no opening the lamp without doing more damage.

In 2017 Restart co-founded the Open Repair Alliance to gather evidence on what stops things being fixed. The alliance agreed a common standard for recording repair attempts at community events and built tools for groups to log them. Volunteers at Restart Parties, Repair Cafes and Fixit Clinics record what came through the door, many of them on Restarters.net. Restart pools what the alliance's partners send in, tidies it, and puts out a single open dataset once a year.

The 2026 release came out for International Repair Day, and the count has grown again. It now holds 619,873 repair attempts from 41,110 events run by 1,728 groups across 34 countries.

Public bodies, researchers, companies and campaigners have drawn on the records to argue for the Right to Repair. The lamp shows one obstacle, a product built so it cannot be taken apart. Restart names others too, including the price of spare parts and software that stops being supported.

The Restart Project · Read the source