Sidmouth Repair Cafe - Home | Facebook
It has its first project:
Futures Forum: Sidmouth Repair Café's first project > reports
Futures Forum: Sidmouth Repair Café's first project > a bus stop bench
Meanwhile other such things are happening in other parts of the County:
Futures Forum: A library of things @ Share Shed: Totnes
And in the States it's really taking off...
This is from a new piece from the Transition Network:
10 Stories of Transition in the US: The Spread of Repair Cafes
BY AINSLIE BEATTIE 9TH AUGUST 2018
In the midst of America’s Great Depression, merchants and manufacturers were looking for ways to quickly reboot the national economy. To get more people working and factories operating again, so the story goes, two main things needed to happen:
First, people had to replace what that they already owned. Through a process that real estate broker Bernard London called “planned obsolescence,” products began to be designed so they would soon fail. Second, the American people, and eventually the rest of the world, would need to shift from being the thrifty citizens that were so celebrated towards the end of World War I to the voracious consumers we are today.
While this extreme wastefulness was once seen as our civic duty, there is now a growing movement of people throughout the United States and all over the world who are finding better ways to strengthen their local economies while helping to heal the planet. One of the most exciting new strategies for doing this is a repair cafe.
Even a few decades ago, shops that fixed shoes, televisions, and a number of other everyday products were still commonplace, but these institutions have been nearly wiped out in recent years. In their place, repair cafes are now providing people with opportunities to breathe new life into broken things while cultivating community at the same time.
First, people had to replace what that they already owned. Through a process that real estate broker Bernard London called “planned obsolescence,” products began to be designed so they would soon fail. Second, the American people, and eventually the rest of the world, would need to shift from being the thrifty citizens that were so celebrated towards the end of World War I to the voracious consumers we are today.
While this extreme wastefulness was once seen as our civic duty, there is now a growing movement of people throughout the United States and all over the world who are finding better ways to strengthen their local economies while helping to heal the planet. One of the most exciting new strategies for doing this is a repair cafe.
Even a few decades ago, shops that fixed shoes, televisions, and a number of other everyday products were still commonplace, but these institutions have been nearly wiped out in recent years. In their place, repair cafes are now providing people with opportunities to breathe new life into broken things while cultivating community at the same time.
The modern repair cafe movement was born in the Netherlands in 2009, and it is now estimated that there are more than 1,300 such cafes operating in over 30 countries.When Therese Brummel of the Arroyo S.E.C.O. Network of Time Banks and Transition Pasadena first read about the concept in the New York Times in 2012, she saw it as an opportunity: “The idea of keeping stuff out of our landfills and raising awareness about decreasing consumerism was something that deeply appealed to us.”
The idea is quite simple, and fairly easy to replicate. At least partially building on Transition Pasadena’s early success, repair cafes have now spread to Transition Town Charlotte in Vermont, Transition Howard County in Maryland, Transition Houston in Texas, and Woodstock Transition in New York.
“I had been reading about repair cafes for a number of years before we actually hosted one,” says Ruah Swennerfelt, who helped spearhead the project for Transition Town Charlotte. “What finally got us going was bringing together a group of three people to oversee the project, do the research, and come up with our own ideas about how to follow-through and make it successful.”
In contrast, Ginko Lee, who helped Therese Brummel publicize Transition Pasadena’s Repair Cafe before becoming one of its most committed advocates, now has about a dozen volunteer organizers and 50 repair people who come out to each event.
“Our first challenge was finding people who knew how to fix things,” explains Margo Duesterhaus of Transition Howard County. “Fortunately, one of our steering committee members is a master fixer and he was able to recruit others. We also were able to recruit fixers through the Howard County Time Bank.”
Most repair cafes simply match repairs that are needed and with people who have the skills to complete them. “A poll conducted by our time bank showed that clothing repairs were the most needed as well as the most offered skill,” observes Brummel. “The following month we held our first repair cafe with seven sewing machines running for three hours! It was a huge success! The following month, we decided to focus on electronic appliances. Again, a huge success! 45 events later, we now offer just about anything you can think of.”
10 Stories of Transition in the US: The Spread of Repair Cafes - Transition Network
And from last month, another substantial piece from the States:
Don’t Throw It Away—Take It to the Repair Cafe
LINDA POON JUL 17, 2018
“They don’t make it easy,” he replied.
We were at a “repair cafe” inside the Elkridge Library in Howard County, Maryland. Instead of silence, we were surrounded by the buzzing of power drills and the whirring of sewing machines. Goedeke was one of the “master fixers” there. He doesn’t like the term, though; he says it should be reserved for the professionals. “We’re all just amateurs at this, and we’re just having fun, mostly,” the 67-year-old retired engineer said.
Around the room, 10 others were helping residents repair everything from tables and lamps to jewelry and clothing. In one corner, a handful of vacuums had begun to accumulate. These were things people normally threw away when they malfunction. “[Our society] has been inculcated in the last 50 years with this disposable concept and to buy the best and the latest,” Goedeke said. “We just don’t expect to keeps things around.”
It's that throwaway culture that former sustainability journalist Martine Postma—now the founder of the Repair Cafe Foundation—aimed to tackle in October 2009 when she created the first of such cafes in Amsterdam. The world had been chucking away some 20 million to 50 million tons of electronic waste a year, according to the UN, creating environmental and health problems when dump sites are burned. Meanwhile the U.S. alone had generated almost 25 billion pounds of textile waste that year.
“It’s not just electronics and textile; also furniture and bicycles and toys—lots of stuff,” Postma said, speaking from her office in Amsterdam. “At the time, the garbage was collected once a week, and every week there were mountains of waste outside, so much that it really shocked me.”
That amount of waste continues to grow today, but so has Postma’s movement. From that first cafe in Amsterdam grew nearly 1,600 more across the globe, including 82 within the U.S. The international attention came swiftly, she said, with like-minded environmentalists asking to set up coffee meetings with her to learn how to get started. She now sells a digital starter kit for €49 (about $58) that includes a manual, permission to use the foundation’s official logo, and communication access to all the other cafes out there.
What she’s discovered was that it wasn’t that people liked throwing away old stuff. “Often when they don’t know how to repair something, they replace it, but they keep the old one in the cupboard—out of guilt,” she said. “Then at a certain moment, the cupboard is full and you decide this has been lying around [long enough].”
That’s why the cafes teach people how to repair their belongings, rather than doing it for them. Back at Elkridge Library, Goedeke led a session on how to rewire lamps, taking one apart and showing the audience the individual components. Each time the fixers worked on something, they explained the process to the person across the table.
With the fabric shaver I’d brought in, the plastic safety switch had apparently broken, preventing the metal parts that carry electricity to the motor from touching. “What we can do is solder this piece together,” he said, showing me the metal plates. That meant getting rid of the plastic safety switch. I gave him the OK, and in minutes, the shaver began humming again.
Goedeke is usually the “catch-all guy,” fixing electrical appliances that don’t fall into the various stations the organizers had set up: sewing, woodwork, jewelry repair, et cetera. Some things are easier than others: Vacuums are among the most common and easiest to fix. Clocks can be surprisingly tricky.
Each cafe operates differently, but Postma says one thing often stays the same: “The atmosphere is always the same,” she said. “It’s always many funny products and happy people.”
The event attracted an older crowd—as many of these do—which meant 21-year-old Andrew Hendren stood out as he watched one volunteer work on his table lamp. The switch broke, he said, so the lamp could only be turned on and off by plugging and unplugging the cord. He had never heard of repair cafes until the day before, and generally wasn’t the kind of person to fix things himself. But he was well aware of how often people throw things away.
“It is such a shame that we are such a throwaway culture,” he told CityLab. “[The volunteer] who was helping me noted that the mechanism isn’t designed to be taken apart and repaired. It’s designed to make you frustrated.”
Postma said the movement has made great progress over the last decade, but acknowledged that more can be done. Attracting younger people would be a good start goal. She wants schools to add—or rather, bring back—technical education. In the U.S., at least, those hands-on classes have been on the decline since the 1980s.
Goedeke himself grew up with woodwork classes, and learned to fix things by taking objects apart and tinkering with what’s inside. These days, though, it’s a bit more challenging, with products using more computerized technology and manufacturers using parts that can’t easily be disassembled. Just recently, he tried to fix his coffee grinder.
“Once I got inside, I discovered that [the manufacturers] had used anti-tamper screws,” he said. “So even if you could figure out how to go through the first layer, you couldn’t get to the motor unless you had a very specific screwdriver.” Other companies make it difficult to buy replacement parts or discourage third-party and self repairs—practices, known as planned obsolescence, that have spurred at least 18 states to introduce “right to repair” legislation.
For the time being, communities are doing what they can to encourage people to fix things. Libraries like the one in Howard County, for example, have started renting out tools and creating “makerspaces” where members learn to both repair and create. Elsewhere, cities have hosted MakerLabs, FabLabs—short for fabrication lab—and Innovation Labs for both adults and children. Bike shops and nonprofits alike have fished scrapped vehicles from the landfill to repair and donate to the underserved community. And similar to the Repair Cafe Foundation, a London startup called The Restart Project are encouraging communities to host “restart parties” with the goal of “fixing our relationship with electronics.”
After all, Goedeke said, it doesn’t take an engineer to figure out this stuff out: “You just have to have the curiosity and will to do things like that.”
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