Good news: You can fix your broken stuff

Before we break for the holidays, The Big Story team decided to try to end our year on a positive note with a week of good news stories. We hope this week brings you hope, light and laughter. On the show we often deliver bad news, but that doesn’t mean that’s all the world is.

In today’s Big Story, lots of companies make a tidy profit from the notion that you’ll throw out their products and buy new ones every so often. This applies to everything from clothes to appliances to electronics. But now, a growing community of millions of DIYers is rediscovering the lost art of repair, teaching others how to do it and fighting for the access and tools needed to make our stuff last, at long last.

Allie Volpe is a senior reporter for Vox, where she wrote about this growing DIY repair movement. “The mindset here is: let’s keep this stuff out of the landfills, it’s better for the Earth, it’s better for your wallet, and you get to learn something in the process,” says Volpe.

So how can you squeeze a few more years out of your stuff?

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