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Repair Cafés—Is there one in Your Neighborhood?

February 18, 2014

In 2012, The New York Times went to the Netherlands to report on a new brand of social activism: The Repair Café. Free of cost and staffed by volunteers, a Repair Café is a place for locals to bring broken household items—not to throw the damaged things away, but to fix them.

Ifixit repair_1Repair Cafés are a novel idea. After all, we live in an age of convenience: ending is much easier than mending. But the idea of communal repair struck a nerve around the world. Since the Times visited the Netherlands, repair cafés, fix-it clinics, and volunteer-run repair groups have sprung up all around the world—from England to Germany, the United States to Canada.

Recently, Al Jazeera’s earthrise—which reports on inspiring ecological, scientific, and design projects—went back to the Netherlands to see how Repair Cafés were faring.

As it turns out, they’re doing very well. At the time of Al Jazeera’s report, there were 96 Repair Cafés in Holland—three times more than when the New York Times did their report a year and a half ago.

“No money changes hands to open a Repair Café,” said earthrise host Matan Rochlitz as he watched volunteers fix microwaves, lamps, and furniture. “Local people request it and word of mouth spreads the message.”

The “message” encompasses more than just repair—that’s what makes them so successful. Repair cafés are equal parts social project and environmental mission. The people who attend these repair events aren’t just learning a new skill; they are fighting back against throwaway culture. And they are fighting to keep stuff out of the garbage bin—because everything that that is manufactured contains within it something irreplaceable: energy, human labor, finite resources.

Every object fixed at a Repair Café is one less that needs to go into the waste bin. Every item that stays in use is one less that needs to be manufactured.

“If something doesn’t work anymore, it’s not worth anything anymore, so people throw stuff away without thinking about how it can be fixed again,” one Repair Café volunteer explained while pushing a torn dress through a sewing machine. Repair reroutes that kind of thinking. People leave Repair Cafés with a better connection to their things—and to each other.

“When we arrived, it looked like the Repair Café was all about fixing vacuum cleaners, and it is,” Rochlitz explains. “But it’s a lot more than that. It’s about making use of the available materials, the available skills, and essentially about repairing communities.”

Ifixit repair_2Repair Cafés are the product of a growing awareness that consumerism—on its own—is neither satisfying, nor sustainable. Repair is better: it’s more rewarding, it saves money, and it’s the first line of defense against e-waste. The same sentiment drove me to start my organization, iFixit—the online repair manual for everything. From iPhones to power tools, we’re empowering millions of repairs a month. It’s that same idea that drives people to start public tool-lending libraries. And it’s that same impulse that shaped groups like The Fixers Collective in New York City and the Fixit Clinic in San Francisco. There’s even a national movement amongst recycling centers to get more involved with repurposing products, evidenced by the growth of the Reuse Alliance network.

All over the world, people are pooling their resources, sharing information, and learning how to be more than just consumers. They are learning to be fixers. And they are starting to fix their world.


 

iFixit is a global community of people helping each other repair things. Their website contains numerous repair guides for electronics, appliances, and vehicles.

 

NERC welcomes Guest Blog submissions. To inquire about submitting an article contact Athena Lee Bradley, Projects Manager. Disclaimer: Guest blog’s represent the opinion of the writer and may not reflect the policy or position of the Northeast Recycling Council, Inc.

 

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