Repair Café saving the environment

The handy skills of half a dozen residents will get household items back up and running instead of tossed in the trash.

The Sustainable Black Diamond Advisory Committee is hosting a Repair Café that offers the skills of six volunteers to fix household items from toasters to bicycles at the Griffiths Memorial Centre March 16 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Volunteer and Black Diamond Deputy Mayor Ted Bain will assist those requiring minor electrical repairs, as well as bring along a toolkit with glue and clamps for other needs that may arise throughout the afternoon.

“As a little kid I used to take apart just about anything to see how it worked and sometimes I could even put it back together again,” he said with a laugh.

While spending time in the Middle East on a peacekeeping mission in the Canadian Forces, Bain said he had carpenters, electricians, refrigerator repairmen and plumbers working for him. Any time they would fix something he would accompany them.

“I learned quite a bit,” he said. “I can now wire an entire house from the electrical box, I can do all the plumbing and all the carpentry.”

Bain said the café keeps household items that still might have some life left out of the landfill.

“We’re very much a throw away society and anytime that we can stop something from going into the landfill it’s great,” he said. “Anytime that we can fix something ourselves it’s a great feeling of accomplishment when something that didn’t work all of a sudden works.”

Bain would like to see people attending this weekend’s Repair Café take an interest beyond getting their items fixed.

“Even if they don’t have something to fix they can look at stuff being taken apart and put back together,” he said.

Dusty Williams, committee chairman, said the event is about making the community more sustainable.

“What we see is skillsets are disappearing - being able to repair things and having a society that just buys new stuff rather than fixing it,” he said. “Once people understand and have that confidence then they’ll be more inclined to fix it themselves.”

Williams’ ultimate goal is for Black Diamond and Turner Valley to have all its needs met within the community, including the ability to repair broken household items.

“The repairing of all these things needs to be within the community,” he said. “The key behind this is not just doing the repairs but having people involved in the repairs and teaching them to do their own repairs. There’s a number of people who have these skillsets and we need to hand them down before they’re lost.”

A table will be set up each for sewing, small appliance repair, sewing machine maintenance, computer problem solving and three-dimensional printing.

Three-dimensional printing processes recycled plastic into granules that can be made to create new parts for items ranging from vacuum cleaners to blenders, said Williams.

“I’m working on another project right now so eventually we’ll be able to print things of out paper, glass and medal,” he said. “You can take the waste you have within the community and turn it into a resource, and finally a product. I would like to see half a dozen printers within the community.”

In his own experience, Williams discovered that replacing a blender part costs $50, with another $50 for shipping. He said it’s not a financial or environmentally friendly solution.

“All we’ve done is ensure that we’re just going to destroy the environment by making things disposable,” he said.

In addition to volunteers repairing items, the Repair Café offers a table where children can work with tools to build projects and learn to repair their toys.