[Scpg] An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time/Repair Cafes

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/world/europe/amsterdam-tries-to-change-culture-with-repair-cafes.html?_r=2

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
Gathered around tables in what appeared to be delicate operations, 
participants tried to fix items that had been set for the trash.
By SALLY McGRANE
Published: May 8, 2012
AMSTERDAM — An unemployed man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer 
took their stations, behind tables covered in red gingham. Screwdrivers 
and sewing machines stood at the ready. Coffee, tea and cookies 
circulated. Hilij Held, a neighbor, wheeled in a zebra-striped suitcase 
and extracted a well-used iron. “It doesn’t work anymore,” she said. “No 
steam.”

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
One man came in to have the charger for his laptop repaired.
Ms. Held had come to the right place. 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.

“Sustainability discussions are often about ideals, about what could 
be,” Ms. Postma said. “After a certain number of workshops on how to 
grow your own mushrooms, people get tired. This is very hands on, very 
concrete. It’s about doing something together, in the here and now.”

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.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Han van Kasteren, a professor at the 
Eindhoven University of Technology who works on waste issues. “The 
social effect alone is important. When you get people together to do 
something for the environment, you raise consciousness. And repairing a 
vacuum cleaner is a good feeling.”

That was certainly true for the woman who brought her 40-year-old 
vacuum, bought when she was a newlywed, to a Tuesday night Repair Cafe. 
“I am very glad, very glad,” she said as John Zuidema, 70, sawed off the 
vacuum’s broken nozzle. “My husband died, and there are all these little 
things around the house that he used to fix.”

To some, the project’s social benefits are as appealing as its 
ecological mission. “What’s interesting for us is that it creates new 
places for people to meet, not just live next to each other like 
strangers,” said Nina Tellegen, the director of the DOEN Foundation, 
which provided the Repair Cafe with a grant of more than $260,000 as 
part of its “social cohesion” program, initiated in the wake of the 
political murders of Pim Fortuyn, a politician, in 2002, and Theo van 
Gogh, a filmmaker, in 2004. “That it’s linked to sustainability makes it 
even more interesting.”

Ms. Tellegen added that older people in particular find a niche at the 
Repair Cafe.

“They have skills that have been lost,” she said. “We used to have a lot 
of people who worked with their hands, but our whole society has 
developed into something service-based.”

Evelien H. Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of 
Amsterdam, agreed. “It’s very much a sign of the times,” said Dr. 
Tonkens, who noted that the Repair Cafe’s anti-consumerist, anti-market, 
do-it-ourselves ethos is part of a more general movement in the 
Netherlands to improve everyday conditions through grass-roots social 
activism.

“It’s definitely not a business model,” Ms. Postma said. She added that 
because the Repair Cafe caters to people who find it too expensive to 
have their items fixed, it should not compete with existing repair shops.

The Repair Cafe Foundation provides interested groups with information 
to help get them started, including lists of tools, tips for raising 
money and marketing materials. Ms. Postma has received inquiries from 
France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, South Africa and Australia.

Tijn Noordenbos, a 62-year-old artist in Delft, started a Repair Cafe 
there four months ago.

“I like to repair things,” he said, noting that the repair shops of his 
younger days had all but vanished. “Now, if something breaks, you take 
it back to the store and they say: ‘We’ll send it to the factory and it 
costs you 100 euros just to check out the problem. It’s better if you 
buy a new one.’ ”

William McDonough, an architect, said, “What happened with planned 
obsolescence is that it became mindless — just throw it away and don’t 
think about it.” His “cradle to cradle” design philosophy, which posits 
that things should be built so that they can be taken apart and the raw 
materials reused (though not necessarily repaired ad nauseam), also 
inspired Ms. Postma.

“The value of the Repair Cafe is that people are going back into a 
relationship with the material things around them,” Mr. McDonough said.

Take, for example, Sigrid Deters’s black H&M miniskirt with a hole in it.

“This cost 5 or 10 euros,” about $6.50 to $13, she said, adding that she 
had not mended it herself because she was too clumsy. “It’s a piece of 
nothing, you could throw it out and buy a new one. But if it were 
repaired, I would wear it.”

Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data 
collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: 
“Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because 
they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental 
concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”

Theo van den Akker, an accountant by day, had taken on the case of the 
nonsteaming iron. Wearing a T-shirt that read “Mr. Repair Café,” Mr. van 
den Akker removed the plastic casing, exposing a nest of multicolored wires.

As he did, Ms. Held and Ms. van der Rhee discussed the traditional 
Surinamese head scarves that Ms. Held, who was born in Suriname, makes 
for a living.

When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left 
over — no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. He 
plugged the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went on. Rusty 
water poured out. Finally, it began to steam.