Everything that arises is worth perishing: Goethe wrote it, but there were no Senseo coffee machines in his day. They break so easily that the question is why they still exist. In the hundreds of Repair Cafés in the Netherlands, where volunteers repair your broken appliances, the plastic Senseo is by far the most widely offered electrical appliance. And they are almost impossible to make.
Volunteers in Repair Cafés are often mechanics from a time when almost everything could still be repaired. They face the throwaway culture with great stubbornness. Just read the moving 49-page ‘Senseeo Repair Manual’, put on paper for all Repair Cafés in the Netherlands thanks to an initiative of volunteer Bob van Dongen from Deventer (give this man a ribbon). The manual is a litany of mounting tabs, obstinate snap fasteners and three-way valves that ‘almost certainly break when the rear wall is opened’.
In the meantime, the Netherlands wants to be fully circular by 2050 and half by 2030: raw materials will then be used again and again, so you have to be able to repair what already exists or reuse parts in another device.
Kees van Kampen (87), a volunteer at the Repair Café van Uden, used to have an electronics store in the village (‘Kees van Kampen Philips Radio and Television’). He sold devices there “with a good price and with an abnormally good service.” Kees would faithfully repair everything you bought from him for years to come, and usually for free.
More than twenty years after his retirement, Kees is now standing with six other volunteers in a spacious workroom in Uden, where they will give the elective subject repair to first-year pre-vocational secondary education at Udens College: an important step in making ‘repair’ a final exam subject. This led by Annie van Genugten, educationalist and founder of the Udense Repair Café.
‘Whooów!’, says a clump of boys who enter.
‘Wow!’ say Annie, Kees and the other volunteers.
Annie works closely with Wiel Wijnen, who is ‘quartermaster’ for the pre-vocational secondary education on behalf of the Ministry of Education. Wiel helps teachers with further training and devising new subjects. This has been the case since many practical courses in VMBO were discontinued in 2016, although they preferred to refer to this as ‘bundling’ and ‘updating’.
Instead of the 36 vocational subjects offered by VMBO, there are now ten profiles. A pre-vocational secondary education student now takes a final exam in a profile and four elective courses, and the intention is that repair can become one of those elective courses as soon as possible. Wijnen: ‘You follow a special procedure for this.’ Ten schools are already participating. ‘And if that procedure has been completed there, we may be able to start nationally at the end of 2022.’
The plan is to include the subject of repair in the elective subject ‘environment, reuse and sustainability’. If I want to add that, Wiel Wijnen asks, ‘otherwise teachers will ask what is hanging over her head’.
I only see advantages: the old volunteers of the Repair Café pass on dying knowledge to a new generation. Then we can repair more (and then we have to enforce the right to repair a device from manufacturers). ‘Hopefully it will also be an enthusing step to the repair courses at secondary vocational education’, says Wiel Wijnen. So that students there again opt for technology more often than an administrative direction. And who knows, the great shortage of mechanics and other technicians can be solved.
I am following a lesson that service technician Geo van den Brand gives today voluntarily to Collin (13), Thymen (14) and Davy (15). Davy prefers to join the police, so he dreams away a bit. But Collin and Thymen, sons of a car mechanic and an electrician respectively, are watching with eagle eyes. They then dismantle a kettle and two printers with astonishing dexterity, after Geo teaching them ‘the great challenge of our time: how do we open an appliance’. Far too many manufacturers now deliberately make that as difficult as possible.
Thymen received a tool box from his father when he was 6 years old. ‘And then I was allowed to disassemble an old washing machine and sell the iron I took out’. Thymen earned 20 euros with it, ‘super fat’.
Circular thinking is not a fantasy of an elite. It’s just normal again.