When the coffee pot stops perking, the vacuum stops sucking, or that lamp no longer turns on, most people either chuck them in the trash or take them somewhere to be recycled. The Recycling and Reuse Hub in Lower Price Hill charges a small fee to take broken appliances — but not all are destined to be recycled. Some are heading for a second life.
"It's managed chaos," says Reuse Manager Jerome Wilson, glancing around the second floor workspace. "You can see the pile here, we've got coffee makers and toasters. We've got electric typewriters, coffee grinders, little radios, power strips, lamps of all kinds. There's Crock-Pots, a lot of vacuums come in."
Tinker Town
Enter the Tinker Team.
"It's where we take donated electronic items that have been brought in for recycling here at the Hub, and we assess them for functionality. Basically, we're looking for items that can still be used," Wilson explains.
The Hub takes in all kinds of small electronics. About a year ago, Wilson realized a lot of the items didn't have to end up on the scrap heap. Many just needed small repairs to be good as new.
Enter a small but mighty crew of volunteer "tinkerers." They show up twice a month to see what they can fix. No experience required.
Don Hoffman is standing over a red bagless vacuum, taking it apart and inspecting its pieces.
"I have no background except for things breaking at home. I'm a retired art teacher, so I just was always one of those people that, even as a kid, would tear things apart and get in trouble for doing that, and then just try to figure out how they work," he says.
When items come into the Hub and get assessed, the ones deemed possibly fixable go onto shelves for tinkerers like Hoffman. They show up, pick something out and see if they can get it working again.
Wilson says a lot of things just need simple fixes — vacuums may be clogged or have dirty filters, or an appliance may need a new fuse. He estimates about 50% of items work but just need a cleaning or small repair. Of the other 50%, about half are repairable with more extensive work, and the final 25% can't be fixed. Those items are stripped of any spare parts that might come in handy later and the rest is recycled.
At the table next to Hoffman, retired engineer Mike Cunaway is taking apart a pair of mismatched lamps.
"There were two lamps here; each one has a different problem. So, the idea is to try to find enough parts to make a single lamp out of the pieces that we have because they really don't have a budget to buy parts yet. They keep a lot of good parts off of broken stuff that can't be fixed," he says.
Old stuff, new life
Once an object is back in working order, it moves to the outgoing pile to be sent to one of the Hub's charitable partners like the Brighton Center, Catholic Charities of Southwest Ohio, and it's main partner, New Life Furniture Bank.
"All of the things that [New Life Furniture Bank gets] are used, not in their thrift shop, but actually given to people who were formerly homeless and have nothing. They've moved into some housing, but they don't have anything else," Wilson explains.
Each item goes out with a Tinker Team sticker, so if it breaks again, it can be brought back for more repairs or free recycling, since the recycling fee was already paid by the person who first brought the item to Hub for disposal.
"Waste isn't waste until it's wasted. That's our motto here at Tinker Team. We have an ethical obligation to keep this stuff out of the landfill," Wilson adds.
The Tinker Team has been up and running for around six months. In that short amount of time, some 600 items have been entered in the system, and tinkerers have worked on almost 80%. More than a third of items have been repaired and shipped out to new owners.
Volunteer and Board Member Jenny Brewer says she's passionate about keeping things out of landfills. She shows up most weeks to help out and do some of the paperwork. She estimates the Hub could host tinker sessions weekly if there were more time and space.
"We would love to," she says with a laugh. "We have to figure out how to clone Jerome first, and then once we get another Jerome in place, we could probably do it more often."
For now, the tinkerers of Tinker Team meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month.
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