Repair Cafe

Repair Café Comes to Wellesley

 

The Natural Resources Committee has been partnering with the Wellesley Sustainable Energy Committee and the Wellesley Recycling and Disposal Facility to find new ways to implement the three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Thanks to a program sponsored by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the MA Department of Environmental Protection, this town-wide effort has a new name: WasteWise Wellesley. Through the EPA’s national WasteWise program, Wellesley joins other communities and organizations throughout the country that have committed to reducing waste.

 

The EPA says that within just one year, half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as waste.  WasteWise Wellesley aims to reverse these trends. The program helps its partners to reduce their purchasing and waste disposal costs and decrease their contributions to climate change and other adverse environmental and human health impacts arising from our consumption, use, and disposal of materials.

The Rotary Club of Wellesley wants to add REPAIR to the three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) program by announcing our first Repair Café Event. It will be held on Saturday October 14^th from 9:00 AM to Noon at the Wellesley Recreation Center Room 008.

 

Repair Café

 

Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). At the Repair Café event, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make most repairs. Repairs can be made on clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields.

 

Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY.

There are over 1.300 Repair Cafés worldwide. 

 

Please register on the Rotary Club of Wellesley’s website. If you have an item to repair, register as a guest to attend the Café. Please list the item you want to repair in the comments section of the registration form.

If you have questions, feel free to contact John Adams at johnfadamsjr@gmail.com or 617-817-0314. If we can talk before the event, then we can make sure to have the necessary parts for repair available.

If you have repair skills and want to help out, please register as a volunteer.

 

 

 

Repair Café House Rules

·        The work carried out in the Repair Café is performed free of charge on a voluntary basis by the repair experts at hand.

·        Visitors carry out the repairs themselves whenever possible, but repair experts on site can help if necessary.

·        The fact that the repairs are being performed by unpaid volunteers reflects the allocation of risks and limitation of liability. Neither the organizers of the Repair Café nor the repair experts are liable for any loss that may result from advice or instructions concerning repairs, for the loss of items handed over for repair, for indirect or consequential loss or for any other kind of loss resulting from work performed in the Repair Café. The limitations set forth in these house rules shall not apply to claims declared justified on the basis of liability arising by virtue of applicable consumer protection legislation which cannot be lawfully superseded.

·        A voluntary donation is greatly appreciated.

·        Any use of new materials such as leads, plugs, fuses, ready-made kneebends 
or applications will be paid for separately.

·        Visitors offering broken items for repair do so at their own risk.

·        Experts making repairs offer no guarantee for the repairs carried out with their help and are not liable if objects that are repaired in the Repair Café turn out not to work properly at home.

·        Repair experts are entitled to refuse to repair certain objects.

·        Repair experts are not obliged to reassemble disassembled appliances that cannot be repaired.

·        Visitors to Repair Café are solely responsible for the tidy removal of broken objects that could not be repaired.

·        To cut down on unnecessary waiting times during busy periods, a maximum of ONE broken item per person will be examined. The visitor will join the back of the queue if there is a second item for repair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why a Repair Café?

We throw away vast amounts of stuff. Even things with almost nothing wrong, and which could get a new lease on life after a simple repair. The trouble is, lots of people have forgotten that they can repair things themselves or they no longer know how. Knowing how to make repairs is a skill quickly lost. Society doesn’t always show much appreciation for the people who still have this practical knowledge, and against their will they are often left standing on the sidelines. Their experience is never used, or hardly ever.

 

The Repair Café changes all that! People who might otherwise be sidelined are getting involved again. Valuable practical knowledge is getting passed on. Things are being used for longer and don’t have to be thrown away. This reduces the volume of raw materials and energy needed to make new products. It cuts CO2 emissions, for example, because manufacturing new products and recycling old ones causes CO2 to be released.

 

The Repair Café teaches people to see their possessions in a new light and, once again, to appreciate their value. The Repair Café helps change people’s mindset. This is essential to kindle people’s enthusiasm for a sustainable society.

 

Most of all, the Repair Café wants to show how much fun repairing things can be, and how easy it often is. Why don’t you give it a go?

Who thought up the idea?

 

The Repair Café was initiated by Martine Postma. Since 2007, she has been striving for sustainability at a local level in many ways. Martine organized the very first Repair Café in Amsterdam, on October 18, 2009. It was a great success.

This prompted Martine to start the Repair Café Foundation. Since 2011, this non-profit organization has provided professional support to local groups in the Netherlands and other countries wishing to start their own Repair Café.

 

Not competing with professional repair specialists

 

The Repair Café Foundation sometimes gets asked whether access to free repair get-togethers is competing with professional repair specialists. The answer is; quite the opposite. Organisers want to use Repair Cafés across the whole country to focus attention on the possibility of getting things repaired. Visitors are frequently advised to go to the few professionals still around.

 

Furthermore, people who visit Repair Cafés are not usually customers of repair specialists. They say that they normally throw away broken items because paying to have them repaired is, in general, too expensive. At the Repair Café they learn that you don’t have to throw things away; there are alternatives.