On an unusually cool and rainy Saturday morning in Decatur, Georgia, dozens of people filed into a warehouse at the back of a church parking lot, their arms full of what a less hopeful group might call junk. Some carried broken lamps, glitching electronics, or cracked furniture. Others walked in with tool boxes, multimeters for testing electric currents, and cans of WD-40. Beneath extension cords dangling from the rafters, they sorted themselves into smaller groups: the volunteer electricians, tailors, luthiers, carpenters, and at least one cutler (knife sharpener), commandeering nearby worktables and passersby as needed.
That’s how Lilly Pettus ended up shoulder to shoulder with three strangers, their hands all pressing together the pieces of her family’s cracked dining room chair as wood glue hardened and a volunteer tightened a clamp.
“This is so interesting,” a giddy Pettus said, inspecting for the first time the joints, one of them broken, that held together the chair she’d owned for decades. “You never even know how furniture is put together.”
Lilly Pettus’s broken chair gets a hand from attendees at the Decatur repair café. Nearby, a sign tracks repair progress during the event. Johnny Kauffman / Grist
This is Decatur’s semi-regular repair café, one of a few hundred meetings like it across the United States. More Americans than ever are turning to these community gatherings to fix what they already own, resisting the influence of companies selling everything from hiking boots, smartphones, and hot water boilers, that push for replacement over repair. One consequence of this throw-away economy is an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing that threatens to intensify climate change.
Yet, organizers and volunteers consider repair cafés as more than a relatively small climate solution. As inflation rises and wages stagnate, the meetups connect people to a movement with the ambitious goal of changing the fundamentals of America’s consumer economy.
At the Decatur repair café, volunteers, wearing green shirts with “I can probably fix that” printed on the back, offered their skills free of charge as patrons observed. A young father of a toddler and squirmy baby watched as a volunteer replaced a switch on a favorite mid-century modern lamp worn out by the older child’s repeated clicking. Murmurs of excitement rippled around the building as the acrid smell of a spot welding project wafted through.
Pettus’ broken chair held in its wood her family’s story. Soon after she and her husband were married in 1996, they began a search for a dining room set. Pettus wanted the chairs to be comfortable for her entire family, but one of her brothers is nearly 7 feet tall, and another just a few inches shorter. “We are not a tiny family,” Pettus said. “We are a big family.”
In 2023, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York passed “right to repair” legislation meant to encourage repair over replacement. A year later the European Union passed a similar directive. Postma and other organizers consider the cafés a natural place for activism to push for right-to-repair measures, although Postma hopes for more sweeping changes in Europe, like a tax on raw materials. She argued it would limit emissions and bolster repair shops, even if it increases the cost of products.
“ I feel for the objects around me. I feel sorry for them if they’re broken,” she said.“I want to make repairing a normal thing in everyday life once more.”
According to Postma, repairing goods is more common in relatively poor countries where replacing them can be especially difficult and expensive. It’s in wealthy countries that repair cafés are thriving, but they’re not at all uniform. Each reflects the surrounding area and its socioeconomics.
“If the world ends, at least I’ll know how to fix a motor.”
On a Sunday afternoon in the Collier Heights neighborhood of Atlanta, volunteers brought most of their own tools to the basement of a building owned by a Seventh Day Adventist Church, setting them on white plastic folding tables atop a light pink carpet. The café looked much different from the one a 30-minute drive across the city in Decatur. The median annual household income in the mostly Black Collier Heights neighborhood is roughly $40,000 lower than in Decatur. Many people who brought items wanted them fixed less for sentimental reasons, and more so they could keep using them.
Gale Pines walked in with a red air fryer that stopped working after they used it to dehydrate ginger. When their oven ran, Pines said, it heated the entire kitchen. So, while in nursing school, they cooked many of their evening meals in the air fryer, most often chicken nuggets and fries.
Pines recently graduated, but had trouble finding a job and couldn’t afford to buy a new $100 air fryer. “It’s just hard to exist,” Pines said. “I don’t really have a very big support network outside of my friends.”
One of Pines’ housemates told them about Collier Heights’ repair café. They keep a bag of broken electronics in the garage that they’d prefer not to send to a landfill. “Being in the height of climate collapse we can’t just keep buying new stuff all the time, both for the economy and for our material scarcity,” Pines said.
When a volunteer at the Collier Heights repair café opened up the airfryer, they quickly discovered the problem: a bad capacitor. Another volunteer had brought a replacement part, and the two of them made the fix as Pines watched, impressed, but unable to follow the relatively complex repair. Pines felt OK that they hadn’t learned how to fix the air fryer themself.
“ To just be around people that want to help other people with the skills that they have, that’s value that is really important to me, and something that I try to do as well,” Pines said. “If somebody in my community has a question about their medication or something and can’t afford to go to the doctor, I’m happy to answer any questions that people have.”
Another volunteer, Lew Lefton, said he thought that the satisfaction humans draw from making and fixing things has largely been lost, but apocalyptic threats like climate change and artificial intelligence have driven many people toward rediscovering more basic, human skills that are key to survival. People who come to a repair café have a different way to view the future, according to Lefton, especially if they learn something or volunteer themselves. “If the world ends” he said, “at least I’ll know how to fix a motor.”
Read More
