THUNDER BAY – Residents celebrated earth day a little early this weekend by helping to keep household items out of the landfill.
The sixth Thunder Bay Repair Café event took place at Waverly Library on Saturday and allowed attendees to have broken items repaired, learn how to do their own repairs, and help reduce waste.
Residents brought in all types of household items for repair, from lamps to video cameras, to clothing.
The event started back in 2022, as a way to help reduce waste produced from city households according to Founder Nancy Saunders.
“A friend and I, in 2020, we were about to launch when COVID started so we had to put it on hold for a while. But we heard about it through an international basically group of repair cafes that happened all around the world,” she said.
“It started in Amsterdam in, I think 2007, and there's over 2000 of them now. So it was out of a passion to stop throwing things away and to share skills and learn how to fix things and have them last longer.”
Saturday's event was the first hosted in partnership with the Thunder Bay Public Library and saw around 20 volunteer repair experts.
Keith Mayer, a volunteer at the café, said he started volunteering because he wanted to spread his repair knowledge with the public and keep things out of the landfill.
“I like helping other people spread the knowledge around it,” he said. “I think it's too often now that people buy something and just throw it away and many things can be fixed and sent back for another future use.”
Repair Café events will happen quarterly for the rest of the year, with the next one taking place in July at Mary J L Black Library.
The day has yet to be confirmed, but updates can be found on the Thunder Bay Repair Café Facebook page.
