Volunteers lending a hand at local repair cafés

The Council is supportive of local reuse initiatives, which play a key part in helping to deliver on the aims of our ten year waste strategy and our Climate Emergency Response Plan.

Repair cafés are one of the local community initiatives that are playing their part to create a circular economy, repairing items to keep them in use for longer, rather than discarding them.

Their popularity has grown in recent years, with more TV programmes showing ways people can repair much loved items for them to continue to use and treasure.

By encouraging residents to extend the life of their possessions, repair cafés reduce the demand for new products and minimises environmental impact.

There are now several repair cafés hosted on a regular basis across the borough. These include:

• Tattenhall Repair Café
• Chester Repair Café
• Helsby Repair Café

They are all run by groups of volunteers and can often help repair a wide range of items from bikes, clothing and wooden items to kitchen appliances, mobile phones and laptops.

The social side of the repair cafés also plays an important role in the circular economy model, providing a place for knowledge sharing and collaboration, and a space for the community to come together to play their part to create greener, thriving neighbourhoods.

Two of the local repair cafés have been able to get up and running thanks to funding through the Cheshire West Crowd, a platform that helps community groups and local organisations to create, fund and deliver their project ideas, with funding from the Council contributing to their success.

Watch the video below about the Tattenhall Repair Café.