News from our network

The Repair Café Foundation and repair platform iFixit have decided to join forces. Together they will commit themselves to supporting the European repair movement even better. Starting this year, European Repair Cafés will receive discounts on tools and parts ordered from iFixit Europe.

The Repair Café has experienced a wonderful year. In 2014, there was again an incredible number of new Repair Cafés, more than doubling the total. At the end of 2013 there were 275 Repair Cafés worldwide, now there are more than 700! Together, volunteer repair experts now prevent more than 200.000 kilos of waste per year.

The European Commission must strive to switch to a circular economy next year. This is what 27 European organisations, including the Repair Café Foundation, wrote in an open letter to the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker.

In the European Week for Waste Reduction, 130 Repair Cafés in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France will invest in a cleaner environment. Their aim for that week, which lasts from 22 to 30 November, is to prevent a total of more than 3,200 kg of waste.

The Repair Café is also seriously beginning to take off in France now. Since the summer holidays, the Repair Café Foundation has had dozens of requests from interested parties in France. “A wonderful development”, says Repair Café creator Martine Postma.

The number of Repair Cafés located around the world keeps increasing. Since March of this year, 200 local Repair Café groups have joined. Especially in Germany, this number is rapidly increasing. And there are also new countries that are now part of the Repair Café network.

People who volunteer at a Repair Café are most strongly motivated to take part because of what they can do for others. They want to help other people live more sustainably, to provide a valuable service to the community and to help improve product reparability and longevity. This is revealed by research, recently undertaken by The Centre for Sustainable Design in Farnham, UK.

Europe must actively promote repair as an alternative to throwing away and buying new goods. That is what the German Federal Minister for Environment, Barbara Hendricks, said on April 7 at the European Forum on Eco-Innovation in Hannover. In her opening speech, the Minister mentioned the Repair Café as an example of what Europe needs in order to achieve a circular economy.