TEDI-London Collaborates with Restart to Host First Student-Led Community Repair Initiative

The Engineering & Design Institute London (TEDI-London), the capital’s recently-opened higher education provider specialising in engineering, launched its repair initiative for the local community last Friday. The ‘restart party’ event, which is the first of an ongoing series, was developed and run by TEDI-London’s 2023 winter residential school cohort in collaboration with Restart, a social enterprise based in London.

During the event, members of the Canada Water community arrived on campus with their slow or damaged small electrical devices and appliances to be diagnosed and, if possible, fixed. TEDI-London students worked alongside their teaching technicians and local, technically-savvy volunteers, to encourage guests to restore their belongings wherever possible, and minimise the amount of electronic waste (e-waste) they produce. With the help of repairers, guests were also invited to make their own attempts at restoring their electronic goods, providing an opportunity to learn new skills and develop the confidence to undertake other repair tasks in the future.

TEDI-London’s winter school saw visiting students tackle the topic of the right to repair and reducing e-waste for an improved circular economy. The participants were tasked with solving a real-world challenge within the context of the local Canada Water community, which provided them with the opportunity to experience TEDI-London’s applied, project-based learning approach.

“We loved the opportunity to work with such an open brief; we’re used to being given a specific problem to solve, whereas during this project we were presented with the key contextual information we needed to identify a specific problem before solving it,” commented Jessica, Anusha, and Layla; three students from UNSW Sydney who participated in TEDI-London’s 2023 winter residential school. “This approach meant that each team supported the overall initiative in a unique way, rather than everyone coming up with the same idea. Our team realised that people with broken items outnumbered those with repair skills, so we came up with a business model to run educational sessions during each event, which will help the overall initiative make an even bigger impact.”

With support from TEDI-London staff and industry experts, the repair initiative has been wholly organised by the university students themselves; a first for a Restart partnership. This resonates with the aim of TEDI-London’s founding partners – Arizona State University (ASU), King’s College London and UNSW Sydney –: to educate up and coming engineers through projects that make a real-world impact. A longstanding community initiative, which also helps to prevent redundant electrical consumer goods from reaching landfill, demonstrates TEDI-London’s commitment to this mission. Through leveraging their own knowledge around circular economy alongside their practical repairing skills, the students were able to divert 7 electrical items from landfill at the launch event alone – a saving of 26.8kg in carbon emissions – despite having limited time to market their initiative.

Isabella Mascarenhas, Vice President, Grass Roots Education & Social Impact at RS Group – one of the programme’s supporting industry partners – concludes:

“Like the projects that comprise TEDI-London’s main degree curriculum, it was fantastic to see how the 2023 winter school project helped the students understand the importance of circular economy, and to see this reflected in the teams’ outputs. Having worked with several universities’ engineering programmes in the past, values such as sustainability and global responsibility are often overlooked, despite engineering students having the power to make real, positive change once they graduate. I’m proud to work so closely with a university that is paving the way for conscientious, ethical engineers of the future, and preparing them properly for the challenges to come.”