The original article in Russell Lights | Ngā Mārama o Kororāreka, August 2025 edition
Russell Kororāreka is going to experience its first Repair Café, on Saturday 13th September at the Russell Town Hall, between 1.00 and 4.00 pm.
This is part of the Repair Café Aotearoa NZ Festival 2025, held across the motu 6—14 September. Our event is being organised by Russell Landcare Trust, along with colleagues from Fixation and Resilient Russell, together with various volunteers who are generously offering their time and skills to celebrate fixing, mending, and extending the life of our belongings.
A Repair Café provides a community with a place to work on repairing everyday objects, such as electronics, mechanical devices, computers, bicycles, jewellery, knife sharpening, toys, and clothing. People bring their items along and local volunteer experts do their best to repair them. It’s not just about providing free repair shops: the idea is to encourage people to learn new skills so that they can keep their own possessions in good order, without having to go out and buy new, ie. to reduce waste, overconsumption, and planned obsolescence, while encouraging people to learn how to ‘doit-yourself’, saving money both in waste disposal and not having to purchase new. And these it can also bring people together and reduce loneliness and isolation.
The idea started in the Netherlands and has travelled throughout the world, with over 3,000 repair cafés in 40 countries. We have become a throw-away society, with even high-cost items such as refrigerators considered essentially disposable. Many of these things could be repaired, but we have all been insidiously down-skilled. People laugh that young people ‘don’t even know how to put on a plug’, but when was the last time you bought something that didn’t already have a plug fitted? Moreover, a plug that was permanently attached that, for example, you stood on and bent the pins, most people wouldn’t be able to fit a new one. At the repair café and volunteers can show you how to. Many repairs are straightforward, but because changes in manufacturing have happened so gradually, a lot of people have forgotten that they can repair things themselves. Repair cafés reintroduce these lost/ diminishing skills, which means that you don’t just take your broken toaster along to be repaired, you sit down with someone who will explain what to do and why, so next time you can do it for yourself. Or for a friend. It’s the work of a few moments to show someone how to sew on a button, but if you’ve never been taught, you won’t know how.
While we are all aware of the threats and reality of the climate catastrophe, few people have heard of resource overshoot, which is when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services exceed what the Earth can regenerate. As you’d expect, western/developed nations use far more than their fair share. Everything we buy uses resources (and its manufacture requires energy and usually produces CO₂), so if we throw something away which could be repaired, we’re adding to the problem. On the other hand, by repairing a toaster or a pair of jeans, we’re extending its life and taking less from the planet, thus living more sustainably. If we want to continue living on this planet, we really need to use our resources over and over again and get back to the situation we were in before the 1970s when the Earth’s bounty could keep up with our demands.
People who have repair skills generally enjoy using them and passing on their knowledge, added to which, it’s actually rather satisfying when you can feel proud of, and cherish, the things you’ve had for a long time. People used to appreciate using their grandmother’s sewing machine or their father’s chisels. Every time you use something with a story behind it, you have a connection with the past and often with your own family’s history. These things have meaning and are not just an item bought one year and thrown away the next. It’s really important to keep things out of landfill and repairing items is far better than recycling, because even in the unlikely event that your kettle or torn shirt could be 100% recycled, that process is also energy hungry and produces emissions such as CO₂. Besides, there is a huge sense of satisfaction to be gained from maintaining things yourself and pride from learning new and useful skills, which can in turn be used to help others. So see what you have that can be repaired, come along, or be one of the volunteers. To get involved, visit our event page here.
