Volunteers needed for third Repair Café
Wai Chu Cheng, Sheridan’s Sustainability Coordinator. (Photo by Natalia Nahon/The Sheridan Sun)
BY NATALIA NAHON
After two years of success, the Repair Café is coming back to Trafalgar Campus. Wai Chu Cheng, Sheridan’s Sustainability Coordinator, is asking for skilled people to help fix household items.
Repair Café is an event where people bring broken items- anything from computers to small appliances- and volunteers repair them for free.
“The good thing about the Repair Café is that it’s an environment where people work together and it is more fun to fix with people around than to fix things by yourself at home,” says Cheng.
This year’s event, that will take place in the SCAET atrium Oct. 20, and is part of an initiative called Zero Waste, that aims to bring to eliminate all Sheridan’s waste in landfills by 2020.
“Repair is one of the strategies to reduce waste. The idea is to change our society mindset. People tend to throw things out whenever things no longer work,” says Cheng.
Cheng is looking to introduce the idea of designing products with sustainability in mind to a class in Industrial Design.
“So it would be very interesting to look at repairs or products from the perspective of design, I hope to introduce this to the students to look at products from design and sustainability perspective.”
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Jaspreet Singh’s headphones after being repaired. (Photo by Natalia Nahon/The Sheridan Sun)
Cheng also talks about the importance of building an idea of community, where people help each other. She finds that a lot of visitors become fixers or volunteers after their first experience.
“I was going to buy another headphone because it was broken,” says Jaspreet Singh, a co-op worker at the Office of Sustainability. He was working at Davis Campus last semester when he broke his headphones. “He [the fixer] actually explained to me how to fix it and if it comes out how to put it back in.”
This year, Singh is planning on volunteering and hopes to become a fixer for future events.
