I hope that one thing that we learn from this coronavirus is that we cannot rely on disposable items such as PPE equipment that is supplied from other countries.

We should also learn lessons about the throwaway society in which we live.

I am now retired but I started my work life as a service engineer and was trained to repair items such as motors for washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Gradually we were supplied with full motors which in some ways made life easier but this was at the cost of losing engineers with the experience to repair items.

A well-known company I worked for started to move on from repairing the product to selling new ones to a customer. Jobs were booked in to repair an item and the engineer had to go through a process of assessing whether he could sell a new product to them. This put a lot of pressure on the engineer as he only had enough time to repair the product and not enough to go through both of the processes.

I retired mainly due to the stress of trying to keep up with attaining sales figures. In these days where cold-calling is taboo I think it is worse being invited into a home to repair a product then turn it into a sales process. We need to learn from this horrendous situation we are in and think about our climate and start producing items that we can physically mend and give people the skills to do it.

As an engineer is is frustrating that products are sold that we have no means of repairing and as a result we fill our rubbish tips with them.

Alan Tew,

Radley Court, Strensall