Fix my gadgets!

Published: March 1, 2019, 9:12 a.m.

Our appliances are getting increasingly difficult and expensive to mend, in some cases by design. So should consumers demand the right to repair? Ed Butler speaks to those campaigning for manufacturers to make it easier for us to fix our electronics goods - with everything from tractors to phones to baby incubators in their sites. Clare Seek runs a Repair Café in Portsmouth, England, a specially designated venue for anyone who wants to get their stuff to last longer. And Ed travels to Agbogbloshie in Accra in Ghana, one of the places where our mountains of e-waste end up being pulled apart and melted down for scrap. The programme also features interviews with Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association; Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit; intellectual property lawyer Jani Ihalainen; and Susanne Baker, head of environment and compliance at techUK. (Picture: Broken iPhone; Credit: Edmond So/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)