Join the Restart Party

The Restart Project isn’t just a campaigning organisation. It gets its hands dirty too, by regularly hosting “Restart Parties”, where members of the public can bring their broken electronics and work with skilled volunteers to get their gadgets working again.

“We tend to fix about 55% of the things that are brought in on the spot,” said Vallauri, but he notes that success can vary significantly. “The most common repairs that are done at these events are screen repairs, for which we have a success rate of 54%,” he said, but power and battery issues are a different story.

“Unfortunately, we tend to have a much lower fix rate because sometimes it is the battery but other times it might be the charging port or much more complicated things that don’t necessarily get repaired.”

Ultimately, according to data he has collected, around 20% of gadgets that are brought in are deemed nonrepairable. But while there are regular failures, miracles sometimes occur.

“We’ve had some exciting and unexplainable experiences with people bringing products that are dead,” explained Vallauri. “They get disassembled by a repairer, together with the participant, and they can’t find any fault. Then they finally put it back together and then it works.

“Sometimes it’s not that a product is necessarily broken, but potentially there’s a loose contact somewhere, that by virtue of disassembling, and cleaning contacts, and putting it back together, you get a product that might have another few years of life ahead.

“We call it the Midas touch,” he said.