Raw Engagement For Electronics Repair

Raw materials, especially those which are scarce and therefore critical in nature, are crucial to the world economy and essential to maintaining and improving our quality of life. They are of paramount importance to the modern, technological world and the potential for supply interruptions is very disruptive to the economy and society. However, issues of critical raw materials are relatively unknown to the general public. This lack of awareness endangers the development of long-term solutions and developments in this field. The REFER project seeks to address this shortfall through the medium of appliance repair for the general public with a continuous series of repair events and associated educational and website resources. The project aims to facilitate education, discussion and engagement around this topic through the unique opportunity presented in this regard.

The project creates and establishes a network of educational-driven, repair-based events across 6 countries in Europe, allowing people to bring their small electrical and electronic devices to be repaired. At these events, attendees have the opportunity to repair their electronic devices and appliances with the aid of trained repairers and restarters. Attendees sit down with expert volunteers and staff to understand how the technology works, identify the problems and affect repairs on the device. Participants can chat to repair personnel about the repair process, the nature of the technologies involved, the range and amounts of CRMs and other scarce resources and what can be done to address the lack of such resources.