Three people walk into the Grandfather Mountain Ballroom at noon on a Saturday. One walks in with a broken bicycle, another walks in with an old rusted lamp and a third enters with a snapped skateboard.
Half an hour later, all three walk back out with newly-repaired items, ready to be used as if they were just bought, rather than being thrown into a landfill. All of this was the result of the App State Office of Sustainability partnering with Repair Hub to host a workshop aiming to fix broken items that people would have otherwise thrown away.
“We’ve been working with the Repair Hub, who are trying to divert these items from being thrown into landfill,” said Idaly Ochoa, an ambassador for the Office of Sustainability. “We’re here trying to promote the Office of Sustainability and let people know that we’re on campus.”
Repair Hub is a nonprofit organization based in Watauga County that travels from place to place to host workshops where they take broken items from the area’s residents and fix them to the best of their ability so they don’t end up in landfills. These workshops are free, so anyone who wants an item fixed can waltz right in to aid their mission of reducing waste.
The workshop took place in the Plemmons Student Union, with several tables scattered throughout the room, each with a Repair Hub member tinkering with an item someone brought to them.
Toward the back of the room sat Andrew Groothuis, the main Repair Hub organizer for the event, fiddling with the wires of a long, broken acorn-shaped lamp. Even with people running around him trying to address different concerns with items in need of repair, Groothuis vigilantly focused on the one-way wiring of the appliance. After a few more twists and turns, the lamp’s bulb shined brighter than it has in years.
“We get everything in here. Lots of stuff like old record players, bubble machines, stuffed animals, lots of clothes, lots of knives,” Groothuis said upon completing his lamp repair job. “No knives today obviously, but we’ve gotten lots of those in the past.”
This Repair Hub workshop was the first of its kind in partnership with the Office of Sustainability at App State, with everyone working passionately toward their main goal: to keep these items from being tossed in a landfill.
“We started this because, well, we throw so much into the landfill that our dump can’t take anymore,” Groothuis said. “They’re having to put all that stuff into tractor trailers and send it off to somewhere, I guess. We’re hoping that events like these can lighten that load a bit.”
The workshop had around 15 people operating the event while working on fixing different items. Throughout the three-hour event, there was never a point when someone wasn’t having an item fixed.
“We’ve never done an event like this with Repair Hub before,” said Ochoa. “But we have several events planned for April, which is Earth Month, and Repair Hub is definitely a big part of some of those planned events.”
Repair Hub and the Office of Sustainability plan to return for another collaboration of this sort in April to commemorate Earth Month. Earth Day 2024 will take place on April 22, with the Office of Sustainability holding an expo for Earth Day three days prior on April 19, and Repair Hub planning another pop-up event for April 27 in the Plemmons Student Union.
