Repair cafe at Saratoga Library helps divert trash from landfills

For Saratoga residents with broken toasters, bicycles, blenders and other household items, a new panacea awaits: the Saratoga Library’s repair cafe.

At the June 30 event, residents were invited to bring their broken household items to the library’s community room, where volunteers not only helped them repair the items for free but could teach them to fix it themselves in the future. The event offered repair and maintenance for clothes, bikes, certain electronics and small electronic appliances.

Event organizers put up a white board tracking the number of items that had been fixed that day, and after an hour, they were up to18 total fixes, with a small bell ringing to mark each success. Also noted were items that couldn’t be repaired.

The idea for the event came from Repair Cafe Silicon Valley, a community service organization that coordinates events like this one to help encourage people to repair their home goods and extend their lifespan instead of sending them to landfills. The organization, which started in Palo Alto and Mountain View, has since spread its ethos all over the Bay Area.

Lisa Liu, Saratoga librarian for adults services, said she was approached by a Boy Scout troop last year about holding a similar event. Liu, who had been wanting to start a repair cafe at the library for some time, was immediately on board. She connected with the Repair Cafe, which helped coordinate volunteers for repair cafes held in July and September of last year.

Liu said she hopes to continue hosting repair cafes at the Saratoga Library, which will be made easier as she builds the small cohort of volunteers who come from Saratoga.

“The people who have volunteered locally range from people who are in the electronics industry and are engineers to people who are very handy home repair people,” she said.

Liu helped pair up more experienced volunteers from the Palo Alto Repair Cafe with newer local volunteers to help make the event happen.

Lawrence Garwin, a volunteer at the event who came from Palo Alto Repair Cafe, said he wasn’t surprised by the number of people who showed up at the Saratoga event but is always glad to see that there’s a demand for repair services.

“I’m very enthused that people will say, ‘Yea, I like this item or I value keeping things out of the landfill and extracting new resources from the Earth, so I’d rather fix what I’ve got and not just push the cycle of planned obsolescence,’” he said.

Looking ahead, Liu said she hopes to host these events at the Saratoga Library about two or three times a year.

“People really enjoyed it; people have been asking for it again,” she said. “So that’s one reason why we are trying to recruit to continue it.”

Maia Coladonato, co-founder of Repair Cafe Mountain View, said the organization also encourages learning as part of its efforts to divert trash from landfills, a sentiment that was present at the Saratoga event where volunteers sat with community members to show them how they approached the repairs.

“The ideal long-term vision is that repair cafe helps to move the needle in terms of having us become more of a repair-oriented society, instead of being a disposable society,” Coladonato said.