Planned Obsolescence Be Damned

"An unemployed man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer" sounds like it might be the start of a pretty good interior design joke, but it's actually the start of a fascinating article in Wednesday's New York Times called An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time. It seems that in Amsterdam, where everyone already rides bicycles and recycles nearly everything and generally does good things for the planet, there now exists something called a "Repair Cafe" -- because they have a cafe for everything in the Netherlands, it seems -- where volunteers who "just like to fix things" will try to save your toaster from the landfill for the cost of, well, nothing:

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus. Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.

What's so great about this is that not only does it prevent people from having to throw things away (though the Dutch only put less than 3% of their municipal waste into landfills, which is remarkable), but it also provides both a physical place where people who might not otherwise afford to pay for a repair can go and, perhaps more importantly, a social place with a sense of community built around issues of ecology and sustainability. According to the article:

“It’s very much a sign of the times,” said Dr. Evelien Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, who noted that the Repair Cafe’s anti-consumerist, anti-market, do-it-ourselves ethos is part of a more general movement in the Netherlands to improve everyday conditions through grass-roots social activism. Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: “Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”

Crazy in a good way, I hope.