Imagine your smartphone's screen gets broken, or your favourite boots get a hole in them. What do you do? You could buy a replacement. Or you could join the worldwide trend of taking your broken stuff to a "repair café".
The Bower Reuse and Repair Centre has just launched Australia's first repair café, in Sydney's inner west. The crowd-funded project will hold weekly repair sessions focusing on bikes, furniture and electrical items.
The first repair café was set up in Amsterdam in 2009, and the Repair Cafe Foundation says there are now more than 400 around the world. A repair café is a free face-to-face meeting of skilled volunteers and local residents who want things fixed. Visitors bring broken items from home and watch, learn or help as the repairs get done. Some things are fixed during the event, while for more challenging items people might be referred to local speciality repair shops.
Last year, according to the ABS, Australians sent more than half a million tons of leather to landfill—more than ten times the amount that was reused or recycled. Mending represents an attempt to resist the throwaway culture. Repair cafés get people talking and give them the chance to network and learn about the local resources available. And, perhaps most surprisingly for anyone who considers mending to be some kind of drudgery, repair cafés can be fun and creative.
"In a circular economy, repair cafés fit right in", says the organiser Martine Postma. In rejecting buy-use-throw, the circular economy aims to keep resources moving around in the economy, rather than moving them through it to a dead end, where they cannot be put into valuable use.
It might be quicker and easier to throw stuff in the bin, but it's more expensive and less fun too.
