Fixing for the future 🔨🌍

Aim

Help people take hands-on climate action through community repair & campaign for policy change

The problem we are trying to fix

The electronic products we use every day are significant drivers of the climate crisis. 

A two-kilogram computer requires 800 kilograms of raw materials. A smartphone, from production to disposal, requires about 70 kilograms. Yet despite their hidden impacts, products are discarded too quickly, creating mountains of waste; the UK is the world’s second biggest producer, per person, of electronic waste - the fastest growing waste stream globally.

This constant push to buy new and add to a growing waste mountain is not only bad for the planet, but it's harmful to people too. Many of the appliances and devices we use every day contain finite resources mined under terrible conditions, so there are a lot of good reasons to repair and reuse, reducing our consumption of throwaway electronics.

Practical Climate Action

The Restart Project aims to fix our relationship with electronics.

Throwaway, easily broken electricals have a huge climate impact, with 80% of the CO2e emissions produced in the lifetime of a laptop happening before a customer even uses it. 

We support local community groups across the UK to avoid CO2 by repairing together through Restart Parties and Repair Cafes, where people teach each other how to repair their broken devices, prolonging their life and reducing the climate impact of our consumption – from tablets to toasters, from iPhones to headphones. 

By bringing people together to share skills and gain confidence to fix their stuff, the groups we support give people a tangible way to tackle climate change, helping them think differently about consumption, and helping to build well connected and supportive communities. 

Image credit: Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Why are we crowdfunding?

We launched the crowdfunding around Green Friday to highlight the climate saving alternatives to buying unnecessary new products around Black Friday. It's estimated that Black Friday creates an extra 1.5 million tonnes of waste in the UK, and 80% of purchases get thrown away! Resisting unnecessary consumption results in a reduction of waste, and reduces the pressure and the impact of producing more.

We are crowdfunding for two main reasons:

Campaigning: Raising the voices of the repair movement to campaign for better, more repairable products, and policies to make repair easier for everyone. Asking people to reach for the repair tools rather than a new product.

Support for community repair initiatives: Supporting and inspiring new groups to start up, helping groups learn from each other and gathering data on the repairs that take place to help increase collective awareness of the positive environmental impact of repair.

The funds will be used to support our UK wide campaigning, including supporting community repair groups to celebrate the power of repair by bringing communities together, reduce our impact on the planet, and teaching new skills during key moments such as Repair Day, which takes place each October. Our campaigning will help to highlight the popularity, the importance and the urgency of repair in tackling climate change.

Image credit: Mark A Phillips, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Our success so far

Over the last 12 years we have created a global community that has already had a huge impact on e-waste. To date, 1050+ repair groups have achieved the following:

Your donations, doubled by Aviva, will help us grow our collective impact and fix our relationship with electronics, through supporting the UK repair movement.

This year, we saw 230 community events take place in the UK around Repair Day, the biggest to date! Support us to make 2026 the biggest year for community repair.

• Find a repair option near you
• Read about our Repair & Reuse Declaration
• Sign up to our newsletter here

Thank you for your support,

The Restart Team

This project successfully funded on 31st December 2025