Sleaford Repair Cafe two year anniversary

National World

Tim Grigg of Sleaford Climate Action Network talks about the importance of the two year anniversary of Sleaford Repair Cafe.

Transcript

00:00Yeah, well, we're running our repair cafe, so it's the sort of standard one we do every two months

00:07where we get people in and obviously we hope we can help them fix their broken items.

00:11Well, it's a special occasion today because it marks the anniversary, two-year anniversary,

00:16since our first repair cafe back in 2022, and over that time we've run 12 repair cafes.

00:25Are you any idea how many things you've repaired, restored over the last couple of years?

00:29Well, as I say, it's round about 170, and I did do a quick number check through,

00:36and obviously some of these are quite complex repairs, and some of the things are just

00:39helping people to sharpen their tools, so they do vary, and as we've got in here today,

00:44we've had a number of items in. The latest thing we had repaired was a hedge trimmer.

00:51We've got another hedge trimmer that's being worked on at the moment.

00:54We've got our sewing circle that we're working hard on. We've had repairs on the clothing.

00:59We've got some electronics works going on as well, and we've got some toasters coming

01:02in a little bit later on, but we always seem to get at least one toaster in.

01:07And you've got some quite, you've got some quite expert people here, I see. You've got like a

01:11trained seamstress and things like that, so you've got some people who really know their stuff.

01:14We have, yeah, I mean, we owe it all really to our, you know, our fantastic team of repairers,

01:21and you know, some of them are just keen hobbyists, but they've got great skills,

01:26and as you say, we've got a seamstress here who has worked professionally in the past,

01:31and she's great at doing repairs, changing zips, and things like that.

01:37Obviously, some things are beyond what we can do with the Repair Café, so they might have to take

01:42them away, and if there's extra work, sometimes we have to, you know, we can make an agreement

01:46between the person who bought the item in, and it's going to incur a little bit more cost.

01:50Of course, the key thing about Repair Café is it's free. You can welcome donations,

01:55but the idea is that if people can bring items into us, you know, we can help them fix them,

02:00because so many items are probably financially not worth fixing, because it costs more to fix

02:07them buying new, but the idea that we can fix these people and save them money, and it's great

02:14in our whole sort of remit of being much more sustainable as a society.

02:19Yeah, so you're doing your bit to help make repairs more viable, I suppose.

02:23It is, yeah, and there's a lot of movement. There's a big organisation across the country

02:28that are working to build this repairing into our sort of psyche, really, so we just don't

02:34think about buying new every time, you know, we do think about can we repair it, and there's a lot

02:39of pressure from legislation to make repairing part of the remit when people build things. I

02:45mean, you hear stories about things breaking down just at the end of their guarantee period and not

02:51being able to do repairs, so this idea of making everything more repairable, so we can keep things

02:57for longer, and we can keep repairing things until they eventually have to be recycled at the end of

03:02their lives, but it's all about being much more sustainable. Yes, and especially as now councils

03:09and authorities are trying to take more care about how people dispose of things like electrical items

03:16and things like that, they're quite stringent about electronics, where they go, things with

03:22batteries in and things like that, so I suppose this is a way of avoiding landfill, I suppose.

03:28It is, yeah, yeah, it's that waste element, and it's also about the resources made to make the

03:35new items, so if you get things to last longer, you know, all the carbon, the emissions from

03:41producing all these items that we're encouraged to buy, we can reduce those down. I know when,

03:46you know, the new government, you know, they're looking to be a zero-waste economy, you know,

03:50that's a great ambition, and let's, you know, hope we can work towards that. I mean, one of the things

03:55we're possibly looking for the future is a little bit of a scheme to re-home appliances that people

04:02have got tucked away in cupboards at home, you know, they may get a new kettle for some reason

04:09and they've got a perfectly good kettle working at home, just tucked away in a cupboard,

04:14so we're thinking about working on a scheme to sort of re-home electrical,

04:19and again, make ourselves out of it. And there's so many very valuable materials that go into

04:26landfill if you're not careful as well, isn't it? Yes, that's right. Again, as part of this scheme,

04:32the idea of disposing of items, because many of the homes we have, laptops or whatever,

04:39at the end of their life, they are full of metals that can be recycled and reused.

04:45And, you know, I think everybody's the same really, over the years, you've got cables in drawers and

04:51you're not quite sure what that cable was for. You've got chargers for things that you can't

04:56remember what you were charging. So all these things can be either reused and, you know,

05:01they're perfectly good chargers, they can be reused as they are, but if they can't be reused,

05:06they can be broken down and the components used and we can continue to make use of them into the future.

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