Repair Café: The Global Movement That Fixes Your Broken Stuff for Free
Repair Cafe – Fix Your Broken Items
Repair Café is a worldwide network of volunteer-run events where people bring broken items—from toasters to bicycles—and fix them together with expert help. The organization provides free meeting spaces, tools, and guidance, aiming to reduce waste and change our throwaway culture. With over 2,000 locations globally, Repair Cafés have become a powerful force for sustainability and community building.
Repairing together is not only good for the environment, but also for the people who do it.
- wilgertvelinga
Considering that for the average person things, not food, nor housing, nor transport are the main drivers of our negative impact on this world. Repairing instead of throwing away is very undervalued.
See: https://myhiddenimpact.com/nl/en to discover your biggest impact driver and https://thinkbigactnow.org to learn more.
- filterfish
My ex-partner and I used to have "drink it and fix it" on Sunday evenings where she would bring stuff out for me to fix and we'd slowly get pissed! Some things remained fixed, some things, erm, needed re-fixing!
- jaredhallen
Like others, I love this idea. A related idea I had was a library of 3d models of parts. Like thingiverse, but specifically for repair/replace components and not limited to plastic. My thought was if it's plastic you could 3d print whatever little busted plastic part was going to send your household item to landfill. But also models of things like automotive parts that you could have made by somewhere like xometry. I thought of it as an "international component database."
- sschueller
Here is a list of Repair Cafes in Switzerland: https://www.repair-cafe.ch
Supported by the Switzerland Department for the Environment.
- electrosphere
I blogged about a local one some years back