Love this idea, from the New York Times (“An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time,” May 8, 2012):

At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things….

“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” [Martine Postma, repair cafe founder] said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”…

“The value of the Repair Cafe is that people are going back into a relationship with the material things around them,” [architect William] McDonough said.