WELLINGTON’S repair café is changing attitudes towards waste by giving day-to-day items a new lease of life.

Founded in 2019, the community initiative, part of Transition Town Wellington, has since worked on more than 2,000 items. This past year was their strongest, with some 500 items passing through the repairers’ hands with a success rate of 80 per cent.

The repair café initiative originates in the Netherlands, with the first café opening in Amsterdam in 2009 by environmentalist Martine Postma.

The initiative’s ethos is to improve local sustainability through the repair of items including clothing, computers and household electrical items. Repair Cafés also strive to be places of learning, engaging users with old or new skills in order to give locals the ability to maintain their items independently. Consequently, the café becomes a space for the community to gather and mingle, joining in a shared passion for sustainability.

In Somerset 145,565 tonnes of recycling was collected in 2023/24 of which only 55.96 per cent was recycled and just 1.64 per cent reused, according to Somerset County Council.

A member of the café’s ‘steering group’, Holly Regan-Jones, said she’s relieved there’s a chance for locals to renew and reuse their items rather than throwing them away.

She said: “The main thing is to stop stuff going into landfill. But that’s just one of three important benefits of the service. The second is to engender a sense of community, and the third is to pass on mending skills.”

In Wellington, the repair café takes place every two months, offering the chance for locals to renew their watch with the help of Dave, or have their computer restored to life by Keiran, among several other services.

While each customer’s item is repaired, tea and cake produced by the local Women’s Institute can be purchased to enjoy with a newspaper. Or, Rowena Marrow said: “you can have a chinwag while it’s all going on.”

A Wellington resident since the age of four, Rowena said she’s visited the repair café numerous times, mostly to bring new life to old clothing.

She said: “I don’t use a sewing machine these days myself but if you were to have it done professionally it would cost a fortune.

“I would probably discard my clothes or put them into clothes recycling if it weren’t for the café.”

Sometimes there is no solution to a broken item, which is what Maureen Colmar found during her first visit to the repair café on Saturday, January 4.

She said: “I was grateful for that advice. Sometimes good advice from an expert is worth a lot as well.”

Co-ordinator of the Uffculme repair café, Tony Lindsell, said it’s the community element that acts as the bedrock for these local projects.

He said: “It’s become quite a community social gathering. We get people coming back every time we operate. You may not even have anything to repair.”

For Wellington, ‘steering group’ member Simon Ratsey said: “It’s almost as though they have to find something to bring in just to be here.”