During the European Week for Waste Reduction, we organised a Repair Café at our newly opened Julian Manduca Green Resource Centre in Floriana. A repair café is a community space where anyone is welcome to learn how to fix broken household goods, a place where you can find the tools, materials and know-how to get just about anything repaired.
On Sunday afternoon 25 November we welcomed visitors to our Centre and set up four different repair stations, manned by a varied group of volunteers offering their repair skills. Visitors could also have a look at our new office space and the ongoing renovation works, the progress and plans for our green wall/roof system and urban garden, and our plastic-free shop filled with organic and fairtrade household products and foods. There were also some delicious baked goodies courtesy of our multi-talented staff and volunteers, and tea and coffee for all to enjoy. All the ingredients for a relaxed, inspiring and fruitful afternoon of repairing.
Here are some snaps of the repairs in action: Paulo and John taking care of electronics repairs, Jim and Salvu fixing up bicycles, Anna, Nastia and Suzanne mending clothes and Marta and Tamsin at the upcycling station, creating new products out of found and discarded treasures.
This was the second time Friends of the Earth Malta organised such a Repair Café, the first one being a one-off event during our Zero Waste Camp earlier this year. Now that we have our own place, we are planning to make this a recurring event, hosting a Repair Café every 3 or 4 months, so that we can together build a community of fixers and repairers, give household goods a new lease on life, and reduce the amount of waste generated on our islands.
If you want to be kept informed of when the next Repair Café will take place, sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. If you have a skill to share and would like to lend a hand during future Repair Cafés, please share your details here and we’ll get in touch!
All photos by Mandy Vella Briffa