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unconsumption:

Repair Cafes: An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time

There’s so much to love about an effort that involves volunteers — helping each other while strengthening a sense of community — and encourages people to repair items they already own. (All key aspects of Unconsumption, as many of you are aware.)

Our friends at Do The Green Thing recently wrote about Repair Cafes. (Green Thing’s post is here.) After reading the Green Thing post, I made myself a note to research the cafe project, and am pleased to see The New York Times covering it today:

At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.

Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.

“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.

“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” she said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”

Inspired by a design exhibit about the creative, cultural and economic benefits of repairing and recycling, she decided that helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste.

While the Netherlands puts less than 3 percent of its municipal waste into landfills, there is still room for improvement, according to Joop Atsma, the state secretary for infrastructure and the environment.

“The Repair Cafe is an effective way to raise awareness that discarded objects are indeed still of value,” Mr. Atsma wrote in an e-mail.

More: Amsterdam Tries to Change Culture With ‘Repair Cafes’ - NYTimes.com

[Thanks to Estelle H. for helping to ensure we saw the NYT story!]

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