Repair Café Consultation

A repair cafe is a place where community members can take their broken household items and learn how to fix them with the help of expert volunteer repairers for free or a small donation. This helps to give broken items a second life and divert them from landfill, while also sharing practical repair knowledge with visitors to enable them to fix their own items at home in the future.

Repair cafes work by providing handy community members a space where they can volunteer their time to help others by passing along their repair skills. This encourages sharing and learning new skills, with the repairer examining the broken item together with the owner to troubleshoot what might be wrong and working to repair the item to the best of their ability. This in turn extends the life of the item and prevents it from being disposed of and sent to landfill. A successful repair is not guaranteed, however other existing repair cafes report an approximately 80 per cent success rate. If a community member’s item is unable to be repaired, they are expected to take it home with them rather than leaving it with the volunteers at the repair cafe.

There are currently 13 repair cafes in metropolitan Adelaide, including in the Cities of Adelaide, Campbelltown, Mitcham, Norwood Payneham & St Peters, and Unley.

Council is investigating whether there is community demand for a repair cafe in the City of Burnside, and how it should be run if so.