 When we talk about carbon emissions, we often focus on things that have a really obvious impact, like flying less, planting trees, switching to renewable energy. These are great solutions, of course, but sometimes we forget about the more hidden impacts that we also need to address. Every product we buy has to be manufactured, mined, grown, or harvested, processes that all produce greenhouse gases and other environmental damage. This is especially true for electronics. In fact, for a device like a smartphone, around 80% of its total carbon footprint is emitted before it's switched on for the first time. Here at the Restart Project, we believe it's really important to keep our gadgets going for as long as possible by repairing them when they break. We're part of a global community of people who run local repair events. So we wanted to learn more about the hidden impacts of our everyday gadgets and work out the most common reasons they break. Knowing this, we could make a stronger argument for laws that make repairing our stuff easier and more affordable. Our first step was to put out a call to our community to drive the investigation. Together, we scoured the internet for data that could tell us about the carbon impacts of common products that repair events like laptops or toasters. We soon found that the best sources for this information were life cycle assessment reports. Manufacturers and academics and consultancy firms use these reports to measure the environmental impacts of products, including how much greenhouse gas is produced at each stage of a product's life. But finding these reports wasn't easy. Many manufacturers simply don't produce them, especially for common household products like toasters and kettles. Some companies do collect this information, but only a small number actually make them available to the public. Despite these challenges, we analysed data on nearly 500 products. We found that it's not just smartphones. For most devices we see at community repair events, the biggest impact occurs before the device is switched on for the first time. That's because for many products, extracting raw materials and manufacturing are very carbon intensive processes. But this data is even more powerful. Let's look at a medium sized laptop, the most common device we see at repair events. We found data for about 64 models of these laptops from Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Microsoft, and learned that an average laptop of this size represents a lot of CO2, about 260kg before it's ever used. That's the equivalent of a flight from London to Berlin, and around 81% of the total CO2 each device produces over its entire life. What's even wilder is that for most of these laptops, the manufacturer assumed a lifespan of just four years. By replacing these laptops so often, the emissions start to add up really quickly. Instead, if we use the device for longer, the lower the CO2 impact will be over time in comparison. But this isn't easy. Many manufacturers are currently making repair more difficult. This is why we need the right to repair. Right now, the EU is considering new measures that could affect how some of our gadgets are designed in the future. This could be a chance to make our devices easier and cheaper to repair. But to get it right, policy makers first need to understand why our devices break in the first place. For years, our community and partners in the Open Repair Alliance have been collecting information about broken devices that people have tried to fix at local repair events around the world, like restart parties or repair cafes. Between us, we have notes on nearly 50,000 broken items. We wanted to see what this real world data can tell us about why devices break. This information could be valuable to policy makers and provide balance to the data that manufacturers themselves provide. So, we designed a series of three quests that anyone could try. The three quests focus on different families of devices that the EU will focus on. We started with printers, then moved on to tablets and e-readers, before switching to the batteries that power so many of our gadgets. In total, over 300 people submitted over 6,500 opinions about 2,000 devices. Thanks to this amazing community effort and support from Action, we now know more about why these products break, which helps us understand what could make them easier to repair. We're now sharing all this rich data, first through our Repair Carbon Calculator, the Fixometer. This is our online tool that lets community groups estimate the amount of CO2 they save by helping people repair things. Our new data will improve the accuracy of our tool and help communities around the world better understand the embodied impacts of the products that we see at our events. We've also begun sharing what we learned from our quests with policy makers and our allies in the European Right to Repair campaign. This type of data is already helping us make powerful arguments for making spare parts more available and repair friendly design. The feedback from citizen scientists who joined us was very valuable and helped us understand we need to continue to improve the quality of the data we collect. In the meantime, we're publishing all of our data so anyone can use it. So a big thank you to our community, partners and everyone who took part. This was only possible with your help. We also couldn't have done it without the support of Action who funded this work and whose advice was invaluable. If you'd like to learn more about our work, visit us at Therese.project.org.