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General Information About the Repair Café

What is a Repair Café?

The Repair Café is an event centered around repair. Tools and materials are available at the Repair Café venue to carry out all kinds of repairs. This includes clothing, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, dishes, household items, toys, and more. Knowledgeable volunteers are also on hand, bringing repair expertise and skills in various fields. Visitors bring broken items from home. At the Repair Café, with the help of the experts, they tackle the repairs themselves. Those who don’t have anything to repair can grab a drink at the bar or help someone else with their repair. Or they can find inspiration at the reading table, where books on repair and DIY are available to browse.

Why a Repair Café?

We throw away vast amounts of stuff in our daily lives—including items that aren’t even that broken and could easily be reused after a simple repair. Unfortunately, repairing things has fallen out of fashion for most people. They simply don’t know how to fix things anymore. The Wissen of how to repair things is rapidly disappearing. Those who still possess this Wissen are often not particularly valued by society and find themselves unintentionally marginalized. The Wissen and skills of these people are rarely, if ever, put to use. Repair Café changes that! People on the margins of society matter again. A valuable exchange of practical knowledge takes place. In this way, items remain usable longer and aren’t thrown away. This saves the raw materials and energy required to manufacture new products. The same applies to CO₂ emissions, since CO₂ is released both during the production of new products and when recycling used items.

At the Repair Café, people learn to see objects in a different light. And they come to appreciate them in a whole new way: the Repair Café helps bring about a shift in mindset. This is urgently needed if people are to advocate for a sustainable society. Above all, however, the Repair Café aims to show that repairing things is also a lot of fun and relatively easy. Come by and try it for yourself!