Bring Them Your Torn Jeans, Your Broken Jewelry, Your Malfunctioning Appliances Yearning to Work Again
Memo to those who refuse to throw away lamps that no longer shine, jackets with stuck zippers, or bracelets that fall off for wont of a clasp: Stop wondering if your stubborn unwillingness to part with these artifacts is a symptom of undiagnosed illness. They may have been gathering dust for a while—but you are about to be vindicated.
Lower Manhattan’s Repair Fest is a free event (the second in a series of three) this Sunday, August 2, at Six River Terrace, from 10am to 1pm. Downtowners are invited to bring in broken appliances, textiles in need of mending, or damaged jewelry, and repair coaches will teach you how to fix them. Participants will learn new skills, save money, and keep waste out of landfill.
Hosted by the Battery Park City Authority in partnership with ThinkZero, this event will evoke in some visitors memories of shop class in high school, when students were taught practical skills. “We needed to find the coaches that actually teach how to do the repairs,” said Craig Hudon, the Authority’s director of programming. “That was the key to the whole thing.”
“This is the next step in taking ownership of things, and longevity of things,” said Sarah Fisher Curtin, BPCA director of sustainability. “It’s a different mindset around sustainability. When something is broken, it may not have to go in the trash. We want people to think, ‘what can I do to make it usable again? And can I do it myself?’”
ThinkZero’s co-founder, Ushma Pandya Mehta, said, “A Repair Fest is a way to think about consumption differently. Now, my kids and I always try to think, before Amazon-ing a new item, ‘can I mend this?’”
“When you bring kids to events like this,” she said, “they learn about how to fix things with their hands. More people are looking for that. We are helping people figure out a new way, give them new skills.”
Her ThinkZero colleague, Nicole De Santis, agreed. “There’s a growing network, a real culture building around this way of thinking,” she said, adding that she recently fixed her father’s vacuum cleaner. “I now have the confidence try to try basic repairs skills—and I am not a handy person!” she said. “There’s something very rewarding about trying to fix something—and then it works.”