Inside the Cork café helping people to give their damaged items a second lease of life

Whether it’s a torn pair of jeans, a broken toaster, or a wonky bike, the team of volunteers at the Cork Repair Café is eager to see if what you bring there can be fixed.

At a time when our throw-away culture is creating mountains of waste, this café offers people a chance to upskill, connect, and even fix their stuff for free.

Kim Anh K. Eastman (known as K), founder and chair of the Cork Repair Café, developed the idea almost five years ago, prompted by her own experiences.

As a woman on a budget, she wanted to repair her broken items rather than buy new ones, to save money.

She could see in her work as a seamstress that, often, the cost of fixing a garment exceeded its original price.

As the fashion business model moved to low-cost and poorer-quality items, there was no incentive for people to repair clothes, and her clients did not possess the simple sewing skills to do it themselves.

She was also finding it challenging to source repair shops locally.

As an environmentalist, she knew there had to be a better way.

Her solution, a repair café, was among the first set up in Ireland.

It began with K bringing together her skills as a seamstress with Matt Jones, of Cork Community Bikes, providing mechanical skills at an inaugural event.

Unfortunately, they launched ten days before covid lockdowns began, but despite this considerable initial hiccup, the café is now a regular event. It takes place on the last Sunday of every month, from 2pm to 5pm, either at Rebel Reads in the northside or the Lough Community Centre on the southside.

K is most grateful that the Cork Repair Café has free access to the Lough Community Centre to run its events. Typically, there is significant footfall at these meetings, with an average of 15-20 attendees.

The cafés bring together volunteers and attendees, who together assess what can be done to fix an item. The participants have an active role in the repair process, gaining skills and confidence in how to repair in the process.

K believes there was a seismic shift in Irish culture that has resulted in a loss of basic repairing skills.

“During the whole Celtic Tiger era, people got into that mind frame of that if it’s broken or if you don’t need it anymore, you just throw it out, and you buy a new one.

“The Celtic Tiger lasted for about a good ten years here in Ireland. And so that was basically a whole generation of people who didn’t necessarily learn how to sew on a button or to glue things together.”

The repair café provides a free, informal platform, open for all to reconnect with long-lost repair skills, offer help to others, and even enjoy a cuppa and chat while seeing the random items that arrive to be repaired.

K says it is not only about getting things fixed and sharing skills, but also about building a community.

The items that typically arrive to be fixed include clothes, coffee grinders and machines, and sewing machines. There is a seasonality to what comes in, and this time of year, they see a lot of vacuum cleaners, while in the spring, hedge trimmers become a regular item.

Some of the most interesting items they have encountered at the café include a World War II radio and little lead soldiers from the 1800s.

The team of volunteers, together with attendees, are incredibly resourceful in fixing items like old lampshades with missing parts by using handles from old drawers.

While the economic value of these items may not always be significant in of preserving historical artifacts and family heirlooms, K describes how a lot of family history is being preserved at these events.

There is considerable scope for improvement in current legislation to reduce the planned obsolescence of some items, from fast fashion items to electrical ones.

E-waste is among the fastest-growing waste categories across Europe.

K sheds light on why our waste is growing. “Almost everything seems to only last like a few months, or less than a year, before you have to get a new one and in particular with clothes. I’ve seen clothes that only last for maybe a few, maybe one or two washes before they fall apart.”

K also highlighted issues in fixing certain items when they are made into one unit such as a kettle.

“It’s not like interchangeable parts,” she adds.

National legislation, spurred on by the grassroots repair movement, is transforming our throw-away culture, and across Europe, there are some meaningful examples.

In Sweden, people can get tax breaks for appliance repairs. In Austria, the residents of Graz can apply for small repair grants covering 50% of the labour costs. In Norway, a five-year warranty is now the norm for most consumer electronic products – more than double the minimum two-year guarantee in the EU.

We can look forward to more national policies like this across Europe in future, as a Right to Repair bill was adopted by the EU Parliament last year. This will make it easier for customers to access information on repair conditions and services, revitalising the repair market by reducing repair costs and promoting affordable repair.

Once the directive is formally approved, member states will have 24 months to transpose it into national law, cultivating a circular economy approach.

Insurance presents an issue for repair cafés at present, K explains, and means that attendees must work on their own electrical items under the guidance of volunteers’ expert advice.

“A lot of the repair cafés we’re having a big fight right now with insurance… There needs to be something, some progress or some conversation about how they can insure repair cafés.

“There really needs to be a lot of conversation over insurance and how to cover the repair cafés and put in legislation nationally, as well as laws in of having interchangeable parts and such.”

In time, K would like the café to get its own dedicated venue or space and increase events to twice a month, but for now, once a month is working out.

See https://corkrepaircafe.org/