South Africa is about to get its first Repair Cafe and we can’t wait! The cafe is designed to help people repair their old things instead of throwing them away.
Mike Servais is bringing an exciting concept to South Africa. The Repair Cafe movement is seeing people share important skills as well as preventing items from ending up in a landfill.
The Repair Café was initiated by Martine Postma. She had been striving for sustainability at a local level. Martine organised the very first Repair Café in Amsterdam, on October 18, 2009. It was a great success.
The concept is a simple one… Host an event at a local church or community hall, invite people with varied skills and then ask people to bring their broken things to be repaired. For example, if someone knows how to repair damaged clothing, they would then work on all the damaged items and show the person who owns them, how to do it too.
This way, an item has a longer lifespan and someone has the chance to learn a whole new skill. We spoke to Mike about the idea and he had this to say,
“The Repair Cafe is a gathering place for like-minded people who like to repair goods. A location will be chosen and we will set up tables to do our repairs on. People will fill in forms at the entrance stating the item they would like repaired. It will then be allocated to the person with the skills needed for the repair. When it is that persons turn they will sit and watch how the repair is done or help if possible. This is a way of passing skills onto other people in a relaxed atmosphere.”
“This is a good system to encourage people not to throw away items on the dump and hopefully, we can minimize the waste to some extent.”
by 