B1-37 · Don’t Throw It Away – Fix It!

Don't Throw It Away – Fix It!

It is Saturday afternoon in a community center in Brno. On one table, a retired engineer is opening an old radio. On another, a student is helping a woman repair the zip on her jacket. A teenager is watching closely as a volunteer explains how to replace the cable of a lamp. Nobody is paying for anything. This is a repair café.

The first repair café opened in Amsterdam in 2009. Its founder, Martine Postma, was worried about how many things people throw away just because one small part is broken. Her idea was simple: invite people to bring broken items and let volunteers with the right skills help them fix them, for free. Today, there are more than two thousand repair cafés around the world, and several of them are in the Czech Republic.

The volunteers are often older people who learned to repair things when new products were expensive or difficult to buy. "When I was young, you couldn't just order a new toaster online," says Jiří, 71, who has been coming every month for four years. "You had to make the old one work." But more and more young people are coming too. Some come because they care about the environment. Others simply enjoy the feeling of making something work again.

Not everything can be saved. Some modern products are designed in a way that makes repairs almost impossible: the parts are glued together, or the company does not sell spare parts. That is why the European Union has introduced a "right to repair", which requires manufacturers to make some products easier and cheaper to fix.

The organizers say that about two thirds of the items that people bring are repaired successfully. But they believe that the most important result is not the number of saved toasters. "People leave with more confidence," says one organizer. "Next time something breaks, they don't panic. They pick up a screwdriver."