Last week Repair Cafe Beverwik celebrated its first birthday with the cake and a lot of fun repairing clothes, mobile phones, coffee machines, furniture, bicycles, and walkers.

We throw away vast amounts of stuff. Even things with almost nothing wrong, and which could get a new life after a simple repair. The trouble is, lots of people have forgotten that they can repair things themselves. Especially younger generations no longer know how to do that. Knowing how to make repairs is a skill quickly lost. This is a threat to a sustainable future and to the circular economy, in which raw materials can be reused again and again.

That’s why there’s a Repair Café! People with repair skills get the appreciation they deserve. Invaluable practical skills are 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.

Repair Café wants to show how much fun repairing things can be, and how easy it often is. The Repair Café was initiated by Martine Postma. Since 2007, she has been striving for sustainability at a local level in many ways. Martine organised the very first Repair Café in Amsterdam, on October 18, 2009. It was a great success.

There are over 2,200 Repair Cafés worldwide. Besides the Netherlands, there are Repair Cafés in Belgium, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and in dozens of other countries around the world. Repair Café has even made its way to India and Japan!