Elizabeth Chamberlain

I’m Elizabeth Chamberlain, Director of Sustainability.

I head our Right to Repair advocacy team, fighting for repair-friendly laws and regulations around the world.

Some of my advocacy wins:

• I testified on behalf of the California Right to Repair bill that passed in 2023 and the Oregon Right to Repair bill that passed in 2024.
• I gave a keynote address at the Free Software Foundation's 2023 Libre Planet conference.
• My writing on repair has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and Wired (with iFixit CEO Kyle).
• I have been interviewed for media outlets around the world, including NPR, Consumerpedia, and Vox.

BA, English, 2007, California State University, Los Angeles

MA, English, 2010, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

PhD, English Rhetoric and Composition, 2016, University of Louisville, Kentucky

Sustainability is a little out of my academic wheelhouse, but it’s been an interest of mine for as long as I can remember.

In college, I was co-founder of a fluorescent light bulb recycling student organization, the Light Up the World with a Dim Light Bulb Foundation (which I wrote about in this ancient iFixit blog post). We made persuasive fliers with important facts—e.g.,  broken fluorescent tubes resulted in the release of 370 pounds of mercury in California in the year 2000—and visited local businesses, trying to convince them to make a recycling plan for their tubes.

The more I’ve learned about sustainability, the more I’ve become convinced that we need collective and legislative action to fight back against the destruction of our ecosystems. But I love Rebecca Solnit’s take on the balance between individual and collective action on climate change:

It’s not good enough for a bystander to say “I personally am not murdering this person” when someone is being stabbed to death before them (and those of us in the global north have countless ties to systems that are murdering the climate, so we are not exactly bystanders). The goal for those of us with any kind of resources of time, rights and a voice, must be being part of the solution, pushing for system change. To stop the murder.

I’m trying not to stand idly by while my planet is being stabbed to death. Through my work, I'm fighting for legislative and ecodesign change. Through my personal choices, I aim to support a more-sustainable world—composting, gardening, using solar panels, buying less and preferring used. Sustainability is always about tradeoffs, and I know there are many ways I can work to be better. But fixing our things to keep them working longer is an important place for us all to start.

Some recent repair wins:

• I replaced the battery in my Lenovo Yoga 720.
• I replaced the power cord and boot seal on my front-load washing machine, which involved a lot of cursing the previous owner of my house for installing the stacked washer-dryer set without serviceability in mind. We had just barely enough room to slide them out of the corner of the room and get the dryer up onto a recycle bin.
• I fixed a sticky motor in my ancient projector screen by, uh, disassembling it and reassembling it. Sometimes “turn it off and on again” is the best medicine

I’ve got two pet rabbits (Cooper and Clementine, a New Zealand White and a Flemish Giant) and a tortoise (Tammy, a 26-year-old Russian desert tortoise who’s been with me since I was 9).

I like to run (I’m only barely faster than Tammy, but I’ve completed six half-marathons), play board games (before the pandemic, I was a big fan of Pandemic, but it hits a little different these days), and make music (in decreasing order of expertise, I play the piano, violin, guitar, ukulele, and trumpet).

• https://twitter.com/liz_ifixit 
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-ch...

Repair Coalition Letter For FTC Energy Guide Ruling (ANPR R611004)