Background
In 2019, approximately 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste was generated globally, an amount that increasing at a rate of almost 2 Mt each year. Embodied emissions, the carbon emissions that are generated during manufacturing, transportation and recycling of products, accounts for around 40% of total carbon emissions in the personal computing sector.
Repairing our electronics allows us to extend product lifetimes, decrease e-waste, and cut down on our carbon emissions. For the every day user (or even relatively tech-savvy ECE students), electronics repair has unique barriers, requiring some technical know-how and sometimes specialized tools.
UBC eKitchen
The eKitchen initiative was developed at the University of British Columbia to help address some of these issues. The eKitchen has three main goals:
- Reducing ewaste on campus: Currently, UBC Waste Management handles recycling ewaste. To improve circularity and reuse on campus, the eKitchen aims to repair electronics and return refurbished equipment to the community.
- Sustainability literacy and repair education: Through the eKitchen and the associated ELEC300R course, we aim to educate undergraduate engineering students and community members on topics related to electronics repair, sustainability and community engagement. As well as building the hands-on skills required for electronic repair, we also want to build sustainability literacy more generally, helping participants better understand the impacts consumer electronics have on the environment and related sustainability initiatives.
- Research: We plan to use data collected from the eKitchen to better understand technical, social and economic challenges associated with electronic repair and reuse. Read about our research here.
Community Repair Cafes
Held around the world since 2006, repair cafes are community events at which drop-in visitors from the community bring their broken goods to be repaired by skilled volunteers. The purpose of Vancouver’s Repair Cafe is firstly to “reduce the volume of waste sent to landfills”, but equally “to change society’s throwaway mindset”. In other words, the goal of this initiative is not only to make a tangible environmental impact through waste diversion, but also to build sustainability literacy in the community by promoting repair. The eKitchen hopes to work with SPEC (Society for the Promotion of Environmental Conservation), which currently runs Repair Cafes across Vancouver in cooperation with the city of Vancouver, to host our own community repair events on the UBC campus.