Our product-monitoring pilot Repair Monitor has run for half a year. High time to carefully take stock of the situation for the first time.
Ten Dutch Repair Cafés take part in the pilot. In recent months, they registered 715 repairs into the online system that was developed by Repair Café International. With the Repair Monitor, we are investigating which products are most frequently repaired at Repair Cafés and what is needed to do so. This way, we want to gain more insight into the repairs of everyday products. That should lead to better repairable products, which can be part of a circular economy.
Bicycle the most popular
From the repairs that have been registered thus far, we can already draw a number of conclusions. For example, in the pilot group, there was an average recovery rate of almost 70 percent.
The bicycle was the product most often encountered at the Repair Cafés. An unexpected result. The recovery rate for bicycles is also significantly higher than the average, namely 89 percent!
For vacuum cleaners – the second most popular product in the Repair Café – that percentage was exactly on average: of the 42 repairs, 28 were successful, i.e. 67 percent.
Household appliances
The product category electrical household appliances is the biggest in the Repair Monitor: 34 percent of all repairs fall into this category. Next are bicycles (20 percent), other products (10 percent, these include lamps, clocks, crockery, and such), sewing and restoration (9.5 percent) and Hi-Fi and audio equipment (almost 7 percent). Tools also score almost 7 percent. Computers and phones score 6.5 percent.
Continue after summer
The Repair Monitor is now in its 1.0 version. Our developer will continue to improve the system. For example, after the summer, we want to allow for better access to the results, so that all participants can easily search the system in order to learn from one another. By the end of the year, we want to have a system that is workable. Together with the Dutch environmental organization Natuur & Milieu, we will then draw further conclusions that will help us grab some media attention. By that time, we hope to be able to say something about brands, common problems etc.
Join in?
In 2018 we will be expanding the number of Repair Monitor users by a few dozen, including Repair Cafés outside the Netherlands. Would you also like to register repair data? Sign up now!
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