The cozy radicalism of repair cafés

On an unusually cool and rainy Saturday morning in Decatur, Georgia, dozens of people filed into a warehouse at the back of a church parking lot, their arms full of what a less hopeful group might call junk. Some carried broken lamps, glitching electronics, or cracked furniture. Others walked in with tool boxes, multimeters for testing electric currents, and cans of WD-40. Beneath extension cords dangling from the rafters, they sorted themselves into smaller groups: the volunteer electricians, tailors, luthiers, carpenters, and at least one cutler (knife sharpener), commandeering nearby worktables and passersby as needed.

That’s how Lilly Pettus ended up shoulder to shoulder with three strangers, their hands all pressing together the pieces of her family’s cracked dining room chair as wood glue hardened and a volunteer tightened a clamp.

“This is so interesting,” a giddy Pettus said, inspecting for the first time the joints, one of them broken, that held together the chair she’d owned for decades. “You never even know how furniture is put together.” 

This is Decatur’s semi-regular repair café, one of a few hundred meetings like it across the United States. More Americans than ever are turning to these community gatherings to fix what they already own, resisting the influence of companies selling everything from hiking boots, smartphones, and hot water boilers, that push for replacement over repair. One consequence of this throw-away economy is an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing that threatens to intensify climate change.

Yet, organizers and volunteers consider repair cafés as more than a relatively small climate solution. As inflation rises and wages stagnate, the meetups connect people to a movement with the ambitious goal of changing the fundamentals of America’s consumer economy.

At the Decatur repair café, volunteers, wearing green shirts with “I can probably fix that” printed on the back, offered their skills free of charge as patrons observed. A young father of a toddler and squirmy baby watched as a volunteer replaced a switch on a favorite mid-century modern lamp worn out by the older child’s repeated clicking. Murmurs of excitement rippled around the building as the acrid smell of a spot welding project wafted through. 

Pettus’ broken chair held in its wood her family’s story. Soon after she and her husband were married in 1996, they began a search for a dining room set. Pettus wanted the chairs to be comfortable for her entire family, but one of her brothers is nearly 7 feet tall, and another just a few inches shorter. “We are not a tiny family,” Pettus said. “We are a big family.” 

The newlyweds settled on a simple table and six chairs — two “host style” with arms, four without — from the local Ethan Allen store. The furniture came to feel more like home than the many houses where Pettus, her husband, and their children lived. They moved the table and chairs with them from Florida to Connecticut, then to Indiana, Michigan, Texas, and finally to Georgia. “ I don’t know anyone’s chairs that I like more than my own,” Pettus said. 

But after absorbing shakes of laughter during countless games of Hearts, and fidgets of anxiety at family meetings about upcoming moves, one of the chair’s joints finally cracked. “We had the chair just sitting in the corner,” Pettus said, “but no one actually sat in it.” She didn’t know how to fix the chair, but if she sent it to a landfill that would mean trashing a reminder of her fondest memories from the last 30 years. 

“When a product breaks and you have to throw it away, it’s very lonely.”

Pettus also thought of one of her children who’d interned at the Environmental Protection Agency and shared his concerns with Pettus about pollution and climate change. Then, after months of the broken chair cluttering the family’s house, Pettus was running Saturday morning errands when she passed the Decatur repair café. She drove the half-mile home to grab the chair, and decided to give it a second chance. 

“When a product breaks and you have to throw it away, it’s very lonely,” said Martine Postma, director of Repair Café International, a Netherlands-based network of 4,000 cafés. “ It’s easier to just go on the internet and order a new item which will come to your doorstep in 24 hours, but that’s also a very lonely, disconnected activity.” 

Postma, a former journalist with the demeanor of an unflappable librarian, founded her organization in 2010 after the birth of her second child magnified her fears about the planet’s future. “Markets are flooded with trash — with cheap products that we don’t need and that do not work,” Postma said. “They break, and they contribute nothing to our well-being. They just contribute waste.”

Repair cafés appear to be inspiring people to use their stuff longer. In 2025, they prevented nearly 2 million pounds of waste — the equivalent of more than 100 fully loaded Boeing 747 aircraft — according to Repair Café International, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the average consumption of about 1,000 Dutch families. 

Postma, Pettus, and millions of others often smack into obstacles when they try to fix their own stuff. Broken products are increasingly difficult to repair, according to a report from the Federal Trade Commission titled “Nixing the Fix.” The report details how Americans are incentivized to “replace products before the end of their useful lives” by companies that decide to make repairs less safe, limit the availability of parts, lock software and firmware, or even “disparage” independent repair. 

In 2023, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York passed “right to repair” legislation meant to encourage repair over replacement. A year later the European Union passed a similar directive. Postma and other organizers consider the cafés a natural place for activism to push for right-to-repair measures, although Postma hopes for more sweeping changes in Europe, like a tax on raw materials. She argued it would limit emissions and bolster repair shops, even if it increases the cost of products.

“ I feel for the objects around me. I feel sorry for them if they’re broken,” she said.“I want to make repairing a normal thing in everyday life once more.” 

According to Postma, repairing goods is more common in relatively poor countries where replacing them can be especially difficult and expensive. It’s in wealthy countries that repair cafés are thriving, but they’re not at all uniform. Each reflects the surrounding area and its socioeconomics. 

“If the world ends, at least I’ll know how to fix a motor.”

On a Sunday afternoon in the Collier Heights neighborhood of Atlanta, volunteers brought most of their own tools to the basement of a building owned by a Seventh Day Adventist Church, setting them on white plastic folding tables atop a light pink carpet. The café looked much different from the one a 30-minute drive across the city in Decatur. The median annual household income in the mostly Black Collier Heights neighborhood is roughly $40,000 lower than in Decatur. Many people who brought items wanted them fixed less for sentimental reasons, and more so they could keep using them. 

Gale Pines walked in with a red air fryer that stopped working after they used it to dehydrate ginger. When their oven ran, Pines said, it heated the entire kitchen. So, while in nursing school, they cooked many of their evening meals in the air fryer, most often chicken nuggets and fries.

Pines recently graduated, but had trouble finding a job and couldn’t afford to buy a new $100 air fryer. “It’s just hard to exist,” Pines said. “I don’t really have a very big support network outside of my friends.” 

One of Pines’ housemates told them about Collier Heights’ repair café. They keep a bag of broken electronics in the garage that they’d prefer not to send to a landfill. “Being in the height of climate collapse we can’t just keep buying new stuff all the time, both for the economy and for our material scarcity,” Pines said.

When a volunteer at the Collier Heights repair café opened up the airfryer, they quickly discovered the problem: a bad capacitor. Another volunteer had brought a replacement part, and the two of them made the fix as Pines watched, impressed, but unable to follow the relatively complex repair. Pines felt OK that they hadn’t learned how to fix the air fryer themself. 

“ To just be around people that want to help other people with the skills that they have, that’s value that is really important to me, and something that I try to do as well,” Pines said. “If somebody in my community has a question about their medication or something and can’t afford to go to the doctor, I’m happy to answer any questions that people have.” 

Another volunteer, Lew Lefton, said he thought that the satisfaction humans draw from making and fixing things has largely been lost, but apocalyptic threats like climate change and artificial intelligence have driven many people toward rediscovering more basic, human skills that are key to survival. People who come to a repair café have a different way to view the future, according to Lefton, especially if they learn something or volunteer themselves. “If the world ends” he said, “at least I’ll know how to fix a motor.”  

Back in Decatur, Pettus left the repair café with a newly sturdy chair. A screw and some glue fixed the crack around the joint, but the chair still needed upholstery work. Someone Pettus met at the café, who had provided one of the sets of hands that held her chair together as the glue set, advised her on where to buy fabric. Pettus thought she might bring the chair back to the repair café for help reupholstering its seat cushion.

“The beauty of it,” Pettus said, “was that I actually was able to learn more about the chair. It was a great experience to know that — I’m not gonna say I birthed it, I of course did not — but I actually had something to do with helping to get it put back together.”

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