Recycling by rewiring

Repaired appliances are now helping fund community efforts as a Blenheim charity shop asks Marlburians to “let us have a go” before throwing faulty home appliances away.

The Blue Door charity shop in Blenheim will accept small household electronics and hope to stop unnecessary dumping of old or faulty toasters, kettles, heaters, vacuum cleaners, stereos and other small appliances.

With experienced volunteers in electrical tagging, newly-supplied shelving donated from Bed Bath & Beyond and hands-on know-how from the Repair Café, they say they can rescue and return many to use.

“Donated items all come through our workshop and get tested and tagged before sales, with any repairs being done to the compliant safety standards before they’re sold,” says Blue Door chair Stephen Leitch.

“We had a huge backlog of things to get tested, but now we’re up to date for donations and they’re just flying off the shelves.

“The problem we see is buying items from a variety of places very inexpensively, they tend to get thrown out quite quickly, so we need to stop people buying things when you could reuse and reduce the amount that's going to the tip.”

Stephen says they want to be the first-stop shop for fixing items ahead of going to the dump.

“There's an awful lot of things that aren't necessarily unusable, they just need a simple repair, so if you don't want your electrical appliances, at least give us a chance to get them back into reuse, even if it does require some repair.

“There’s eight recycle shops is Blenheim and I don’t think we should all be competing on everything. With our volunteer know-how in this field, we’d like the chance to try and fix it and while contributing to some good.”