Fix my gadgets!
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our appliances are getting increasingly difficult and expensive to mend, in some cases by design. So should consumers demand the right to repair?
Ed Butler speaks to those campaigning for manufacturers to make it easier for us to fix our electronics goods - with everything from tractors to phones to baby incubators in their sites.
Clare Seek runs a Repair Café in Portsmouth, England, a specially designated venue for anyone who wants to get their stuff to last longer. And Ed travels to Agbogbloshie in Accra in Ghana, one of the places where our mountains of e-waste end up being pulled apart and melted down for scrap.
The programme also features interviews with Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association; Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit; intellectual property lawyer Jani Ihalainen; and Susanne Baker, head of environment and compliance at techUK.
(Picture: Broken iPhone; Credit: Edmond So/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:06.3 | Is it right that companies effectively stop you from doing your own fix on gadgets even after you've bought them? |
| 0:12.8 | They have responsibility to make sure that a product is safe during its entire use. |
| 0:18.2 | They also have to guarantee the data security and cybersecurity of that product. |
| 0:22.5 | Today we're looking at the right to repair the growing global campaign for a free and open |
| 0:28.2 | market to fix the stuff we buy. Consumers should have the right to know how to fix all of their |
| 0:33.4 | things. I think every product that you buy should come with a repairment guide and it should say, |
| 0:37.2 | hey, you know, here are the common failure. And when they fail, we get your back. |
| 0:41.8 | That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:48.9 | We have repair cafe that happens in Portsmouth every month and people bring their stuff to fix. |
| 0:54.9 | That's Claire Seek, the owner of a place called the Repair Cafe in Portsmouth in southern |
| 0:59.8 | England, a venue meant to encourage citizens to get their electrical items lasting longer. |
| 1:05.5 | My granddaughter's heated rollers won't work. |
| 1:09.1 | It's obviously when I said to my mum that we were coming in today, my mom was like, let's bring |
| 1:12.6 | the rollers. |
| 1:13.6 | And yeah, we bought them and then the man's fixed them. |
| 1:15.6 | If someone brings in a zip or a button, that's really easy to repair. |
| 1:18.6 | The challenges we really have are around electronics. |
| 1:21.6 | There are some items that you even can't get into because they're so physically plastic sealed. |
| 1:25.6 | There's also tiny screws sometimes that are, |
| 1:28.8 | you know, little safety screws which you literally can't take the item apart before you even try to |
| 1:33.2 | fix them. It's criminal that you can buy a kettle one month that won't work the next month. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.