Repair cafes serve up old-school skills
An old toaster needs restoring, a hem needs sewing, an umbrella needs mending. Don’t throw them out – find a repair cafe.
How many volunteers does it take to fix a toaster? If you’re a committed tinkerer like Andrew Lewis, one is probably enough, although he might still spend a good hour salvaging something that plenty of others would just throw away.
Take the mustard-hued toaster that is presented to him one sunny Saturday morning in Bendigo, where Lewis and several other volunteers have set up their monthly repair cafe, hoping that their decades as hobbyist repairers will prevent more things going to landfill. Like failing kettles and broken zips, wonky toasters feature regularly at these free repair-fests, although this model, with its still gleaming chrome top, is especially well loved and, by today’s disposability standards, pretty old. Katy Curtis received it as a gift from her mother-in-law perhaps 25 years ago and it has been used most days since, only starting to fail around July when the lever refused to stay down.
With affordable replacement models readily available, Curtis could have easily thrown hers away. “But I like it,” she says plainly. Plus, recalcitrant lever notwithstanding, “everything works”. So she’s been improvising; for the past half year her toasting routine has co-opted two heavy chopping boards, one to hold down the lever and another to anchor the first chopping board so that the weighted toaster remains on the bench.
Still, Curtis kept wondering if it might yet be repaired. So this morning, between a martial arts class and a children’s drama group, she packed it into a cloth bag and brought it to this former church hall where, for three hours, Lewis and others attempt to salvage strangers’ possessions gratis.
“For my generation, it seemed you learnt from your father by osmosis how to fix things,” says Lewis, 64, a retired electronic engineer who still loves restoring old radios. But it’s not just inquisitiveness that has brought him to the hall where he and his fellow volunteers, clad in matching black aprons, clamour around a trio of trestle tables bearing toolboxes and sewing machines. Alarmed at the amount of waste he was seeing everywhere, in mid-2019 he volunteered for his first repair cafe. He was hoping his mix of professional and homegrown skills might benefit a wider audience as well as the environment, a quiet act of generosity he displays this morning as he gently dismantles Curtis’s toaster. Prising off the mustard sides and carefully removing the chrome lid, he discovers that something – possibly a mouse – has eaten through a wire.
Watching Lewis work is almost meditative. For close to an hour he focuses on the appliance, spending minutes carefully accessing the chewed cable, gently brushing decades’ worth of crumbs from the circuit board, and cautiously waving a cigarette lighter to seal tiny bits of rubber insulation on two other strands of wire, explaining each step to Curtis to ensure he is always imparting knowledge. Finally, the toaster is restored and its volunteer saviour has a familiar pang of satisfaction. “It’s a good feeling,” Lewis says quietly. “You just get a buzz out of making things live again.”
There is something timeless and old-fashioned about this scene, with its mix of altruism, patience, time and perseverance. But it’s not just a toaster that has been revived today. As Lewis’s fellow volunteer, sewing teacher Jenny Feiss, says: “It’s about saving the art form and not just the item.”
Repair cafes are a comparatively new phenomenon, even though the ethos behind them is rooted in old-style skills. Based on the idea of locals lending their knowledge and tools to mend neighbours’ household goods and in the process reduce waste, the first cafe was organised in Amsterdam in 2009. There are now more than 1500 worldwide, about 40 in Australia.
“It’s helping people keep items rather than having to throw them away,” says Guido Verbist, general manager of The Bower, an environmental not-for-profit that in 2014 opened Australia’s first repair cafe in inner Sydney. “Traditional skills have been lost and nowadays you throw things away because it’s cheaper to buy a new one.”
Appliances that once seemed to last for a generation don’t seem so sturdy today and are replaced within a few years. “Manufacturers factor in a certain product lifetime according to target groups, applications and product cycles,” says a 2016 report commissioned for the German Environment Agency. Smart new smartphones don’t feel quite so new when an updated version arrives, a marketing model not helped by the “planned obsolescence” that last year saw manufacturers Apple and Samsung fined millions of euros for slowing down their older phones. Even fashion, like food, has become fast, thanks to mass-produced styles available at comparatively affordable prices. The apparel and footwear industries produce more than 8 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions and, according to fashion sustainability group New Standard Institute, the average consumer bought 60 per cent more clothing in 2014 than they did in 2000 – but kept those garments for only half as long.
All that consumption comes at a cost. In an ever-more disposable world, every year in Australia we generate 2.7 tonnes of waste per person, and the amount is increasing. According to the National Waste Report, in 2016-17 we created around 67 million tonnes of waste – even more than in 2014-15 – and electronic waste was identified as an increasingly significant issue.
But not everyone is chasing the latest model. Many are happy to retain a loved or just serviceable item, if only they could find someone to repair it. Enter a growing army of volunteers. Over the past five years, Guido Verbist and his Sydney colleagues have saved countless juicers and slide projectors, table lamps and stereos. Today they run weekly repair cafes in multiple city locations, resurrecting up to 75 per cent of the failed goods presented to their menders. “Some people come because it’s an emotional attachment they have to an item that for a long time belonged to the family,” says Verbist. “But the vast majority do it because they want to keep it from landfill.”
At the midweek gathering in inner-Sydney Zetland, even the location lives up to the mantra of reuse. Held at the site of the former South Sydney hospital in a building that was previously a surgery, that history of resuscitation is still evident in the flow of electrical items brought in for possible repair: a pair of portable fans that have stopped rotating, a large toaster that keeps shorting, and a tabletop neon light that was accidentally overloaded with power. “My ethos is to at least have a go,” says volunteer Alan Finlay, a semi-retired electrical engineer who tries but ultimately fails to save the four-slice toaster this afternoon.
Not everything that arrives is necessarily broken. “All too often we have people bring in a vacuum cleaner saying, ‘it’s not working’, and the first thing we do is have a look inside and it’s full of dust – they’ve never thought to empty it,” says Finlay, 67. And not everything that is broken can be fixed. As Verbist says: “The main thing we have to tackle is that products are made in a way that they are not necessarily repairable.”
Simple kitchen appliances, once easy fixes, now frequently come with screws that can only be opened with special tools, and many cheap, single-use items such as popcorn makers are covered in so much plastic they virtually need to be destroyed to be prised open. Others no longer come with service manuals and join an impressive stack in a back room: old stereos, a rice cooker, a handheld vacuum, multiple computer screens, a food processor and a printer, many donated, all waiting to be resuscitated. Those that cannot be fixed are stripped for parts and appropriately disposed of.
Saving a blender to blitz another day is just onepart of the objective of these volunteers. Passing on knowledge is equally important. “That concept of fixing has always been a really important part of our tradition, not only First Nations but since [European] people came here and arrived with nothing,” says Elsie L’Huillier, who helped found the Bendigo repair cafe in 2017. “The bush mechanic is a big part of our culture.”
Yet over the past three years, L’Huillier has regularly had customers seeking guidance for repairs that might once have been seen as routine: hemming a pair of jeans, say, or righting a broken lamp. Either they have no idea how to apply a remedy, she says, or they lack the confidence to try. Under the cafe’s rules, customers may bring only one item for repair, and as much as possible they are guided with tips on mending the item themselves. Today’s tally of broken goods includes a solar shed light, a bra needing an underwire removed, a yellow umbrella that won’t stay open, an idle remote-controlled car, a wooden rocking chair with a broken spring, a hand-cranked document binder, an electric frying pan, a pair of jeans with a broken button, one tea towel with a frayed edge and two stand mixers. Some items were acquired only weeks ago, others date back decades.
Bernie Slater, a retired carpenter and builder, carries a broken tyre pump he has been using for close to 30 years. At 75, he has developed his handyman skills over many decades. But carpal tunnel syndrome means he can no longer mend the split tubing on the pump, which he still uses to inflate the tyres on his wheelbarrow. “A lot of shops would say ‘throw it away’ and give it to the scrap metal merchants,” he says when asked how he might otherwise have been able to repair the pump (which, at a volunteer’s suggestions, is ultimately saved with some discards from Slater’s own shed: a length of thin green tubing he uses to blow out dust when drilling holes in concrete walls).
“It’s not a service; sometimes people come in and think that they are going to drop it off,” L’Huillier says as a volunteer shows a young woman who has never sewn before how to do a basic stitch, and within minutes the woman is darning her torn dressing gown. “We think the education component has a reifying effect,” she adds. “Every person who comes in here probably impacts on three or four other people.”
More than 25 groups pass through the cafe this morning. While not everything can be fixed, L’Huillier estimates that a good 20kg has avoided a trip to the rubbish tip.
One of the last to be helped is Helen McCarthy, who gently places an old stand mixer, circa 1970s, on the long table. Her late grandmother, Zoe Malouf, “a magnificent cook” and for several years the caterer at the local golf club, used the appliance for many years, whipping up cakes and pies and Lebanese feasts at Christmas. As a young woman, McCarthy spent the first six months of her married life living next door to her beloved grandmother, who “loved a good chat, and she’d come over for morning or afternoon tea, all dressed up in her good clothes, beads and earrings on and make-up done,” she recalls.
“One of the memories that stays with me the most is cooking with Nan … I didn’t have a Mixmaster at that time, so Nan passed her 1970s Sunbeam Burst of Power Beater Mixer on to me. It came with a stand and the two white bowls. For some reason the bowls don’t turn on the stand, so for the past 26 years, whenever I’m baking, I just stand there and hang on to it.”
A week ago, after years of dedicated service, the mixer stopped working midway through churning a batch of shortbread dough. “I didn’t want to throw it away, because it has so much meaning and many memories attached to it. Every time I bake with it, I think of Nan and her recipes and how her food brought us together. Even though I don’t use the mixer for the Lebanese recipes, I feel like she is with me when I’m baking. I look at her photo on the fridge smiling at the camera and think of the connection between her generation and mine and the sharing of knowledge that happened in those short few months.”
McCarthy could not bear to throw away an item so imbued with memories. “Nan would be very grateful, because cooking was really important to her,” she says as a volunteer takes the old mixer and gently disassembles it. “I think she would just be so impressed that I am attempting to have it fixed so that part of the family history just keeps going.”
The switch had failed – and within a few minutes it has been repaired. “I’m ecstatic; I’m getting emotional really,” McCarthy says as the familiar drone that has filled her family’s kitchens for so long can be heard again. “If it hadn’t been fixed I would have been really sad. The fact it was fixed, it’s like Nan’s still with you.”