HOW IT WORKS
You fix it together
Visitors bring broken items and work on them with volunteer fixers, using the tools on site. If you have nothing to mend, you can help someone else.
Check an itemA broken kettle does not have to go in the bin.
At community repair events, people bring broken things from home and fix them together with volunteers. Since the first Repair Café in Amsterdam in 2009, the idea has spread around the world, and the repair logs they keep now show what can be mended and what stops it.
Updated
Check an itemTHE SHORT ANSWER
Half get fixed,
all get a look.
Three findings from community repair
events and the data they collect.
SUCCESS
About half go home working
The Open Repair Alliance says participants fix 53% of all products they bring, while 25% of attempts end with the item judged end of life.
See the numbers
BARRIERS
Parts are the hurdle
Where repairs could not be finished, the report found no spare parts in 25% of cases, parts too expensive in 18%, and in 16% a product that could not be opened.
How to join inA QUICK ITEM CHECK
How old is
the thing you bring?
Pick a kind of item to see its average age at community repair events, from the Open Repair Alliance 2024 report. The bar shows how old the items typically are.
Based on the Open Repair Alliance report The rise of community repair (October 2024).
TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
Often fixable,
often blocked.
One figure on success,
one on what most often stops a repair.
53%
Share of products participants fix
With volunteers' help, participants fixed 53% of all products. The authors note that many of these items would have had no commercial repair option.
FIXED · OPEN REPAIR 2024
25%
Barrier cases caused by missing spare parts
The most common barrier was a lack of available spare parts. Parts were too expensive in another 18% of cases.
BARRIER · OPEN REPAIR 2024
The dataset covers 208,491 repair attempts logged by 1,158 groups in 31 countries across 19,986 events. Volunteers have also sorted records by fault type, including 3,511 laptop records in online quests in 2020 and 2021.
FOUR WAYS TO JOIN IN
Bring a thing,
or bring a skill.
Community repair runs on visitors and volunteers. These are the ways the organisers themselves describe taking part.
Bring the broken item
Clothes, furniture, electricals, bicycles, crockery and toys are all among the things people bring.
Stay and work on it
You repair alongside a volunteer rather than dropping it off, so you learn how it was fixed.
Lend a hand
If you have nothing to mend, you can help with someone else's repair, or browse the repair books.
Start one locally
There are over 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide, and the international foundation supports new groups that want to start.
THE RULES ON REPAIR
Spare parts,
by law.
In March 2021 the UK government announced that, from that summer, manufacturers would have to make spare parts available for products such as washing machines, fridges and televisions. It said this could extend product lifespans by up to 10 years.
The Open Repair Alliance puts this in perspective: for 96% of the products brought to community repair events, there is no right to repair in sight, and it argues for support well beyond the 7 to 10 years in current rules.
Questions
Questions people ask
What is a repair café?
A free meeting place where people bring broken items and repair them together with volunteers who have repair skills, using tools and materials provided on site.
How often do repairs succeed?
The Open Repair Alliance says participants fix 53% of all products brought to community repair events, while 25% of attempts end with the item judged end of life.
Why do repairs fail?
Among the barriers to finishing a repair, the 2024 report found a lack of spare parts in 25% of cases, parts too expensive in 18%, and in 16% a product that could not be opened.
Do repair cafés take work from repair shops?
The Repair Café foundation says visitors are often pointed to professional repairers, and that many visitors would otherwise throw items away because a professional repair seems too expensive.
When did the first one open?
The first Repair Café was held in Amsterdam on 18 October 2009. A support foundation followed in 2011, and there are now over 2,500 worldwide.
Sources
Where the facts come from
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