From the archive
29 Oct 2026
Seventy-six per cent of the things carried into Repair Cafe Pavia's first Repair Day Festival left in working order. The group was marking its tenth year, and Repair Cafe Borgarello was marking its second on the same occasion. The festival was organised with the University of Pavia's Office of Sustainable Actions and mixed talks and workshops with live repairs. The organisers estimate the fixing saved 793 kg of CO2e, and they want the festival to come back every year.
Pavia was one of 3,497 events in 53 countries counted by The Restart Project for Repair Day, held on 17 October and in the couple of weeks either side. The UK had almost 350, more than 100 up on the previous year. In France, HOP reported over 1,300 events for the fourth edition of Les Journées Nationales de la Réparation. In Kingsland, Auckland, a permanent repair co-lab opened, and Aotearoa New Zealand's repair movement released a Repair Manifesto.
The Open Repair Alliance released its dataset on the day. It now holds more than half a million recorded repair attempts and, for the first time, includes non-electrical items. The release puts the average at over 400 repair attempts a day worldwide.
At your repair event, keep a simple log: one line for every item that comes through the door, with what it was and whether it was fixed. Include the failures as well as the successes. The Open Repair Alliance dataset now covers non-electrical repairs as well as electrical ones.
The Restart Project · Read the source