About
A few notes on how Tinkerton Repair Café runs, and on where the numbers we publish come from.
Our numbers
Most of the carbon cost of an everyday object is spent before you ever switch it on. Mining the metals, making the parts, putting it together and shipping it across the world all happen first. Keeping a thing working means nobody has to make a new one yet, and that is where a repair does its good.
So when you check something in, we ask what kind of thing it is. We look up what it costs the planet to make one, then take half of that. We do not ask our volunteers to guess a number.
The sum
carbon saved = carbon to make one × 0.5
That last number matters. A repair does not save the whole cost of a new item. We assume a repaired thing lasts about half as long again as it would have, so one repair prevents about half a new purchase. It is a careful way to count, and it is the same one used across the wider repair movement.
Some everyday examples
| Thing | Carbon to make one | Saved by fixing it |
|---|---|---|
| Laptop medium | 265.5 kg | 132.7 kg |
| Mobile | 51.1 kg | 25.5 kg |
| Kettle | 44.3 kg | 22.2 kg |
| Vacuum | 36 kg | 18 kg |
| Clothing/textile | 20.3 kg | 10.2 kg |
| Toaster | 8.1 kg | 4.1 kg |
Measured in kg of CO₂e, which counts all greenhouse gases together as if they were carbon dioxide.
What this figure is, and what it is not
We would rather publish a number we can explain than a bigger one we cannot.
The figures come from Fixometer reference data (2021), The Restart Project. It covers 61 kinds of thing, gathered from real products at community repair events. Some rest on only a handful of measurements.
Our numbers
Repairs done counts items that went home working. An item we could not fix is not counted, and neither is one still waiting for a part.
Success rate is out of the repairs we finished one way or the other. Items still open are left out, because counting them would make us look worse than we are while we are still working.
Volunteers counts the people on our team, not visits. Somebody who comes to every session counts once.
Sessions held counts sessions that actually happened, not ones we had in the diary.
Behind the scenes
This site runs on Repair Café Hub, free and open source software made for grass-roots repair groups. Anyone can read the code, check our sums, or run it for their own cafe.