Here's how and where to get household items repaired 

Got a broken household item you don’t want to sling? We find out why mending is better for us and for the planet

Product development engineer Rosy Seal tinkers with 1950s munitions store pendant lights in Broken: Mending and Repair in a Broken World by Kate Treggiden.

I've had four household appliances break in the last year: A two-year-old dishwasher proved uneconomical to repair; an expensive smoothie maker’s blades jammed and broke off. Its replacement, which was a gift, ground to a halt, just weeks after its warranty expired.

Recently, a third and deliberately inexpensive choice of smoothie maker lost much of its power within months and slowed to the speed of stirring a spoon, leaving an unappetising lumpy mix of spinach, cucumber, lime and mint. Welcome to the world of built-in obsolescence and the guilt of suspecting some of these broken items would end up in landfill, something which might have been assuaged had I known about the worldwide Repair Café network.