SPRING 2022 / REAL-LEADERS.COM 75 LEADING LEADERS 76 MONEY 77 CLIMATE ACTION 78 SOCIAL IMPACT 74 INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY 79 INVESTING manuals. The site helps 10 million people a month repair a spectrum of goods, according to Wiens. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has launched a new focus on medical equipment such as ventilators. “It’s our stuff, and we should know how to fix it,” Wiens says, stressing the benefit to low-income communities. Peter Mui, founder of Fixit Clinic, has helped organize nearly 600 community-level events since 2009 in which people bring in broken items and learn how to fix them. “Lo and behold, 70% of this stuff is repairable — and that’s with no access to service manuals, diagnostic tools, or schematics,” he says. In Europe, almost 80% of respondents to a 2020 survey said manufacturers should be required to facilitate the repair of digital devices. “In comparison to other ecological issues, there is no public resistance against repair measures,” says Markus Piringer of Austrian nonprofit Eco Consulting. This year, the group partnered with the city of Vienna to launch a voucher program under which owners of items — from bicycles and phones to guitars and dishwashers — can recoup up to 100 euros ($115) toward repair bills. Electronic equipment accounted for more than 60% of Workers dismantle old computers and electronics at E-Parisara, an electronic waste recycling factory, 45 kilometers from Bangalore, India. India’s growing digital economy has contributed to the amount of e-waste it generates. According to the Karnataka, a state pollution control board, more then 10 tons of electronic waste is produced in Bangalore alone every year and about 80% of e-waste generated in the US is exported to India, China and Pakistan to be recycled. the 26,000 repairs subsidized under the popular scheme, which reduced Vienna’s e-waste last year. The Viennese effort has inspired a similar project in Portland, Oregon, due to launch as a pilot in the coming months. But some products today have become just too hard to fix, so France launched the world’s first reparability index in 2020, requiring producers to rate their products’ fixability. Advocates hope the index will push companies to change their output before it even hits the shelves. As Mikolajczak puts it: “No one wants to rank last.” n Carey L. Biron is Washingtonbased writer and editor reporting on land, property, and cities for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. GETTY IMAGES / URI EL SINAI
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