Farnham repair café say they have saved local residents over £300,000
“Repair Cafés are free ‘community-centred workshops’ for people to bring consumer products in need of repair.
A local repair café say places like theirs can help tackle both the cost of living and climate crisis
The Farnham repair café say they've saved local residents around £300,000, as well as over 80 tonnes of carbon emissions
Martin Charter is founder of the repair café
"So repair cafes are very, really quite simple in nature. They're generally run in a community space. It's, often a church, a town hall or a school or whatever. And effectively people bring in broken products. That might be a vacuum cleaner, it might be clothing, it might be a bicycle.
And what you then have is a series of workstations around the product areas and you have volunteers who repair products. And generally speaking, they are very skilled people
You've got pretty elite teams, particularly in electricals. They are people who've built products for, you know, designed and and and produced, in effect, products for maybe 20, 30, 40 years for large companies.
We have a guy that's built his own flight simulator. So it's incredibly high levels of technical skills"
However it's not just repairs that the café offers, Martin adds he thinks it's very important to try and teach the younger generation skills to be more practical
"It's a very important point in terms of the next generation and the skill base that isn't necessarily there within school curriculum, even university curriculum.
You know, I'd split this into two quick points we do have a fantastic example of a repairer who joined us when he was about 14 or 15 with his parents to satisfy safeguarding requirements and he's now starting an aeronautical engineering degree at University of Surrey and he will know huge amounts more about these issues than some professors or certainly the other students.
So the second part is, you know, the challenge. We have 40 volunteers, we have, you know, 70, 80, you know, customers, if you like, on average. It gets very, very busy.
So the challenge is how we engage with young people and we generally engage with young people through giving opportunities for Duke of Edinburgh's awards on our front desk.
But we're also now exploring the potential to go out more proactively to schools and youth groups."
Martin adds that repair cafes can help tackle both the cost of living crisis and the climate crisis due to reducing consumers' carbon footprint
"We've got statistics on our website. I think we're up beyond 80 tonnes of carbon savings and we've developed carbon calculators that other repair cafes use.
What we also do that perhaps a number of the other repair cafes don't do is we also measure the sort of the value of rather than replacement in the sense of not buying a new product. So we reckon through our activities, we've saved Farnham citizens over £300,000"