People bring items to be fixed to the Reuse Alliance’s Repair Fair.

Visitors to the Reuse Alliance’s Reuse Hub in Corte Madera can learn skills including sewing, soldering and lamp repair.

There’s an episode of the TV comedy “South Park” in which one of the main characters, Randy, wakes up his two young children and says, “It’s come to my attention that kids don’t know how to do s—. You’ve got your phones and your AI, and you kids haven’t learned to be able to actually do anything. So, we’re going to take this morning to learn how to fix something.”

Randy shows his kids that the oven door is broken, explaining that he’s going to teach them how to fix it. He then takes out his cell phone and calls a repairman.

With few exceptions — my husband, for example, can fix just about anything — our society has collectively decided to toss everything rather than attempt to fix it. Collectively, Californians send nearly 45 million tons of trash to landfill each year, including nearly 1.2 million tons of textiles. We threw away approximately 1.5 tons of e-waste every minute in 2023. According to CalRecycle data, up to 95% of fabrics in landfills could have been reused, repaired or recycled instead of being thrown away.

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We may think of this stuff as out of sight, out of mind. But a number of the state’s landfills have garbage burning uncontrolled underground, leading to boiling temperatures that release toxic gases and hazardous liquid waste to the surface. 

Even if we want to fix things the way Randy does, it’s increasingly difficult to find someone who can do it. There were 100,000 shoe repair shops in the U.S. in the 1930s; today there are only around 5,000. You’d be hard-pressed to find a place to fix small appliances like toasters or microwaves — a Google search states that there are “zero dedicated storefront repair shops” in San Francisco. Low-cost fast fashion, meanwhile, all but encourages........

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