Cutting down on waste: Boise's first Repair Café helps fix your broken items

By Murphy Woodhouse,

Published June 20, 2023 at 2:20 PM MDT

"Cynthia Richards shows off her newly repaired juicer, which had given some 30 years of loyal service before an orange-heavy recipe brought it to a halt."

Repair Cafés have a simple goal: pairing people and their broken household belongings with tinkerers and tools to fix them, shrinking the flow of waste to landfills.

The idea started in Europe but has spread to the U.S. and cafés are starting to pop up in the American West. Boise just had its first, and the Mountain West News Bureau’s Murphy Woodhouse went to check it out.

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Idaho Matters Waste

Murphy Woodhouse

As Boise State Public Radio's Mountain West News Bureau reporter, I try to leverage my past experience as a wildland firefighter to provide listeners with informed coverage of a number of key issues in wildland fire. I’m especially interested in efforts to improve the famously challenging and dangerous working conditions on the fireline.

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Samantha Wright

As Senior Producer of our live daily talk show Idaho Matters, I’m able to indulge my love of storytelling and share all kinds of information (I was probably a Town Crier in a past life!). My career has allowed me to learn something new everyday and to share that knowledge with all my friends on the radio.

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Cutting down on waste: Boise's first Repair Café helps fix your broken items

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