Volunteers who are using their tools in a community event are proof that not everything that’s broken should be tossed in the landfill.
The Sustainable Black Diamond Advisory Committee is hosting its third Repair Café where volunteers repair broken furniture, electrical items, small appliances, toys, bicycles and clothing brought in by residents in an effort to reduce waste. The event takes place in the Griffiths Senior Centre Nov. 2 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“The fact that they can repair things rather than have to buy new again, that’s a big one,” said Dusty Williams, a member of the repair café subcommittee of the advisory committee. “People are becoming a lot more conscientious. It’s a lot better for the environment.”
The past two cafés both attracted 30 to 50 residents who brought in items from an electric dinosaur to old clocks that stopped ticking.
Williams said the café not only serves as a place to drop off broken items, it’s also an opportunity for education.
“Not only is it there for people to do repairs for them, but they can also take part in the repairs,” he said. “The people who are doing the repair work, they work with the people who come in with the items so they have the skillset to do this.”
Most items that are broken can be fixed, whether with a needle and thread, glue or a set of pliers or hammer, said Williams. Even items with missing pieces can be repaired with a 3-D printer that melts and shapes plastic into the shape needed.
Williams said the repair café is part of creating a self-sustaining community.
“When we develop skillsets like the 3-D printing where you can get parts for your bustled blender at home, then the community itself does not have to rely on external resources,” he said. “We’re not shipping parts from 1,000 miles away. It keeps everything local. We can support ourselves locally in many more respects than we think. The more we do locally the more resilient the community is.”
A change to the café this year is the involvement of up to a dozen Oilfields High School students.
“Our goal is to expand it by bringing in more youth so they can take part in this as well,” Williams said. “They have quite a few talents as well and it expands that age range where you have kids teaching kids and older people teaching older people. That community networking is very important.”
Cindy Watts, Oilfields learning commons facilitator, said students in the school’s weekly maker spaces program — who have been focusing on sustainability, from making their own clothing to repurposing recyclable material — have expressed an interest in being part of the café.
“The students are coming to me and saying, I’ve always wanted to learn how to fix this but no one has shown me how,’” said Watts. “If you talk to the elders they’re like, ‘I would love to come in and show you guys how to do this.’ It’s teamwork, and it’s fabulous how the community and school have collaborated. It’s a beautiful thing.”
The students will set up a repair table to fix items, as well as bring items they collected from the school to be repaired to learn skills they don’t already have.
Watts said the café is a great teaching tool where youth learn the importance of repairing what they already own as opposed to replacing it.
“So much stuff is getting thrown away that’s unnecessary,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to use the stuff and get it out of the landfill. Why throw something away that’s broken when it can be repaired.”
The school is already reducing waste by accepting items from the community for its maker spacer program such as fabric, which Watts said has been a success.
“I find the community wants to reuse and repurpose and recycle their things,” she said. “The community has come and said, ‘We want to give our stuff to the students because we want to see that it’s getting used.’”
