More Karori repair cafés planned

Continued from page 1. Held at the Karori Community Centre, the repair café helped 27 people who brought along items that needed fixing.

A lot more than 27 items were repaired, however, as a number of people brought more than one item to be fixed.

“We, along with our volunteers including help from the Sustainability Trust, are keen to have another,” Julia says.

When that will take place had not been decided when this issue of the “Independent Herald” went to print.

The repair café is a pop-up koha workshop where people can bring that broken/torn/ failing appliance or favourite item and find out if it can be saved from a premature trip to the rubbish tip.

Six skilled volunteers were on hand to help people repair items, or to fix them if helping people to build their repair skills was not possible with particular items.

The repair café was put together by an organising group of three people: Julia, Tracy Ward and Karin Anderson.

Recycling was evident in more than just the repairs, too. People also brought recycling that is not collected at the kerbside to the café, so it could be forwarded for further use, rather than going to the landfill.

The Karori West Scout Group was also present, selling sausages outside the community centre.

The whole emphasis of the repair café was “about responsible production and consumption. We use any opportunity we can to maximise that sustainability framework,” Julia says.

Julia was inspired to set up the new Karori Repair Café by two motivators.

One was the repair café run by the Sustainability Trust, where she worked, and the nearby Ngaio Repair Café.

Another inspiration came from starting her masters study in sustainability.

Throwing away things that could be repaired is a “crazy way of doing things,” Julia says.

“We throw things away when there is so much life left in them.

“Waste is just a paradigm. If we looked at things as resources we would have a lot less going to the landfill.”

The Karori Repair Café is a member of the national organisation Repair Café Aotearoa NZ as well as the international organisation.

“We put ours [the Karori Repair Café] out in an international database,” Julia says.

“Internationally there are records being gathered around the life of products and information on products brought to repair cafes and the repairs that are needed.”

Karori has now contributed to those databases.