Mar 16, 2026
Repair cafes, staffed by volunteer “repair coaches,” allow people to get free repairs for appliances and clothing items. Mark visited Repair Café El Barrio, in New York’s East Harlem neighborhood, and talked to coaches and guests.
In December 2020, Nature published a report detailing a cataclysmic shift in humanity’s relationship with Earth. The total mass of the world’s human-made objects, its authors explained, had come to equal the entire biomass of the planet itself. That is to say, the weight of everything created by our hands – skyscrapers, automobiles, iPads, plastic straws – was on the verge of exceeding that of all trees and all plants, all animals and all humans, indeed the mass of all living things put together. Let’s put this another way: You are currently living in a world in which the human ability to create garbage – or eventual garbage – has surpassed Earth’s ability to generate life. (p. 14)
The global balance sheet of trash today is astronomical. Humans currently manufacture their own weight in new stuff every week, only about one percent of which has been estimated throughout the world to be in use six months after its purchase. . . . Every day, the world discards 1.5 billion plastic cups, 250 million pounds of clothes, 220 million aluminum cans, 3 million tires. . . . In the ocean alone, per every human, there exist 21,000 pieces of plastic, a net mass of shopping bags and six-pack rings and bottle caps that by 2050 will exceed the weight of all fish put together and is expected to double every six years for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, in just the minute it took you to read this paragraph, another million plastic bottles have been discarded and another garbaged truck full of plastic has entered the seas. (p. 17)