The BBC TV show “Repair Shop” is a firm favourite for feel good television! It’s riding a wave of enthusiasm for repair and re use as people get fed up of new consumer goods that are deliberately made hard to repair. For International Repair Day in 2024 and 2025 I landed national media coverage for The Restart Project, the UK’s leading charity promoting community repair and the reduction of electrical waste.
It’s a charity very close to my heart because I set up a repair cafe where I live. Huddersfield Repair Cafe is my absolute pride and joy! It’s honestly heaven for me being at repair cafe. So many items that come in have stories attached, and I love a good story. It’s also a fabulous example of people from all walks of life collaborating in an impactful and joyful endeavour. We help save items from landfill, save their owners some cash and cut out the energy and resources needed to manufacture new items. Toasters, radios, vacuum cleaners, lamps, computers, hair dryers, children’s toys, our fixers tackle them all!
So, when the Restart Project asked for my help I was well and truly in…
International Repair Day 2024- BBC You and Yours and lots of local radio and TV
In 2024 we offered a story round the rapid growth of the repair cafe movement . Figures from the Open Repair Alliance report on community repair showed a huge growth in community repair events nationally and globally. In the UK alone repair cafes grew from 400 in 2023 to 600 in 2024. We also promoted The Restart Project’s Beyond Recycling of Electronic Waste (BREW) Report. The report showed that less than 20% of the UK’s household waste and recycling centres offered a reuse option for small electrical or electronic waste. The report was inspired by a study which tracked the electricals taken to a household reuse and recycling facility over the course of a week. Four citizen scientists checked all 599 items of e-waste that were due to be shredded for recycling that week. They found 274 (46%) items were still working or would require little more than a cheap fix to be reused.
It’s pretty shocking that so many perfectly usable or easily repairable items end up being shredded. Winifred Robinson of BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours was shocked! You can listen to her interview with Fiona Dear, Co Director of the Restart Project on BBC Radio 4’s website. (25 minutes in). And you can also hear me! You and Yours wanted to come out to record at a repair cafe and the handiest one for the BBC in Salford was Huddersfield Repair Cafe. So how could we say no…
Here’s Catherine Earlham from BBC Radio 4 interviewing Peggy about her childhood toy monkey who had stopped making a noise.
Local radio and TV … and what came after
As well as national radio coverage of International Repair Day I approached local TV and radio around the UK. My locals pitch led to coverage on BBC Radio Yorkshire, BBC Oxford, BBC Radio Berkshire, BBC Radio Solent and BBC TV South Today. And the lovely people at Positive News ran a fabulous article about repair day on their website and socials.
But approaching journalists isn’t just about what happens to the story you pitch. It’s also about getting your name and your brand out there. Soon journalists find their own way into your inbox. Not long after this story happened, The Restart Project got asked to participate in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week and The Bottom Line with Evan Davis. And Huddersfield Repair Cafe’s fab fixer Spanner Spencer got called up to talk with Matt Chorley on BBC Radio 5 Live about what the dial on a toaster really means!
International Repair Day 2025 and the “end of Windows 10”
Our story about International Repair Day 2025 led to repair cafes being profiled by the consumer team at The Sun. The Sun’s repair focussed article in print and online raised the profile of International Repair Day to millions of readers. ” Broken doesn’t always mean you need to buy new. Instead, try fixing your items. Here’s how . . . ” The online version also carried links to the Open Repair Alliance website, hosted by The Restart Project. It featured on The Sun’s Facebook page, which has 3.9 million followers.
My pitch to local news outlets where we knew there were events to attend grabbed us lively, feel-good coverage on Meridian ITV, Calendar ITV, BBC Radio Cambridge and BBC Radio London, Sheffield Live TV and the Sheffield Tribune.
End of Windows 10- 20 million British people affected
On October 14th 2025, ironically International e-waste day, Microsoft switched off support for Windows 10, the most popular operating system in the world. The Restart Project joined circular economy and digital rights organisations around the world in calling on Microsoft to avert an e-waste mountain by extending free, automatic support for Windows 10. Pressure from campaigners led to some concessions by Microsoft. They made security updates free for one more year for Windows 10 users in the US and the European Economic Area (that’s not us any more folks!). But that’s basically a 1 year snooze button. End of Windows 10 will still potentially make millions of computers obsolete.
The aim of Microsoft is to make everyone upgrade to Windows 11. Millions of computers around the world can’t run Windows 11 because their hardware isn’t whizzy enough. The Restart Project hit on a plan to do some polling to find out how many computers would be affected in the UK and what plans people had in place. Their polling found that 20 million people in the UK were affected. That’s one in four computers. Alas, they weren’t the only ones who had that idea. Which, the consumer magazine, also ran a poll doing something similar, and they’re much bigger than us ! So everyone who liked this story went with Which’s polling.
Nevertheless, my dogged efforts led to The Restart Project’s quote on the subject being featured in two articles in Mailonline. Second one here.
My new pal Jeremy Vine !
I was honoured to be invited by The Restart Project to join them for their Parliamentary Repair Cafe in June 2025. Broadcaster Jeremy Vine was there, speaking about the long running saga of his Segway monowheel that needed replacement batteries. He was shocked to discover, after paying £450 for one, that it’s a model Segway don’t service anymore. Thus began a journey into discovering how hard it can be to repair modern devices because manufacturers like Segway don’t design for repairability. In fact, they often make repair deliberately difficult… so you buy a new one. The upside for Jeremy is that he got to meet lots of lovely repair types and feel the joy of repair cafes. Here is Jeremy Vine interviewing me and some fellow repair enthusiasts! (I’m on from 55 seconds in). And in case you were wondering, he’s a thoroughly nice bloke!
So that’s the repair cafe story so far! You can read about some more national and local stories I’ve worked on with other charities on my news page.
If you’d like some lovely national or local media coverage for your organisation get in touch on richard@diversitypr.com or come and say hello on Linkedin.