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And it's celebrating exactly nine years since the whole thing started:
13-21 October: International Repair Café Week 2018
The International Repair Café Week (IRCW) is almost here again! It’s happening from 13 to 21 October. All over the world volunteers will be organising meetings focusing on making repairs together. With the IRCW we are putting the subject of repair in the international spot light. From the Netherlands to Canada, and from New Zealand to the United States.
Repair Café is 9
On Thursday 18 October 2018 it will be exactly nine years since Martine Postma organised the very first Repair Café. On this day in 2009, dozens of locals came to a theatre in Amsterdam-West with broken items. And now there are over 1,600 Repair Cafés in 33 countries on six continents
On Thursday 18 October 2018 it will be exactly nine years since Martine Postma organised the very first Repair Café. On this day in 2009, dozens of locals came to a theatre in Amsterdam-West with broken items. And now there are over 1,600 Repair Cafés in 33 countries on six continents
Home - Repair Café (EN)
It all started in Amsterdam:
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].”
Repair Cafes Aim to Fix Our Throwaway Culture - CityLab
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