A Repair Café is a place where neighbours can help neighbours fix broken household items, for free! They provide community members with the option of getting their item repaired, or learning how to do so themselves with the help of a volunteer ‘Fixer’. These events make repair more accessible and affordable and encourage waste reduction within the community.
Our next Repair Cafe is March 28, click here to register your items!
We are looking for volunteer “fixers” who enjoy fixing household items such as small appliances, furniture, electronics, clothing, bikes, and more to participate in Repair Cafes over the coming year. Hobbyists and professionals are all welcome! Interested? Sign up below and we’ll get in touch with more details.
See our upcoming repair cafes:
Why a Repair Café?
The Repair Café Foundation has three goals:
- To bring back repairing into local society in a modern way.
- To maintain repair expertise and to spread this knowledge.
- To promote social cohesion in the local community by connecting neighbours from very different backgrounds and with varying motives with each other through an inspiring and low-key event.
Why Should You Repair?
Western society revolves around consumption; we buy and throw away items more than ever before. We have been taught to live in a linear economy where raw materials are used to make products and discarded at the end of their use. In contrast, a circular economy uses design and development to avoid producing waste in the first place.
In our modern system, there is significantly more emphasis put on innovation and creating new products and technologies rather than on the care, maintenance, and repair of existing ones.
Products are no longer typically designed for disassembly and repairs. Factors like the plastic revolution have enabled manufacturers to replace more durable and fixable parts with mass-produced, cheaper materials. When these plastic pieces break, it can be hard to replace, and accelerate the end of life of the product by rendering the item non-functional.
The amount of time a product stays in use has also decreased significantly in recent years. It is more common than ever for people to accumulate tools and products and upgrade to newer versions before the original product has truly reached its end of life. Many of these lightly used items are then thrown into the landfill instead of being recycled, shared, or reused.
When we repair, we extend the useful life of an item and combat overconsumption. When we deconstruct an item to repair it, we could also find alternative uses for the individual components. Ideally, we would want to eliminate any part of the item going to waste.
You may have heard of the “right-to-repair” movement that has gained traction in the last few years. This movement focuses on the legal rights of consumers to repair the products they buy, and emphasizes that products should be designed to be easily repaired, and that spare parts and manuals should be freely available.
However, even if parts, manuals, and online tutorials are widely available, practical repair work can be daunting and technically challenging for someone unfamiliar with it. Repair Cafés can provide the infrastructure and collective learning environment needed to gain confidence in repair skills, share tools, and empower citizens.