What About a Tinker Club in Reno To Fix Broken Items For Donation Purposes?
A recent Reno subreddit thread with the question what does Reno need? had what we thought was an ingenious response by yankykiwi saying “my last city had a sort of tinkers thrift store attached to the dump.”
The commenter went on to explain that if someone dropped off a broken home item, such as an oven, dishwasher, lawnmower, after bringing it in, it would be fixed and sold, or given to a person in need. They added the place employed people with practical knowledge who struggled getting hired in other places to do the fixing.
Locals immediately responded they would volunteer or want to start such a program here.
The Truckee Meadows Habitat for Humanity Restore on Greenbrae Drive does have an existing version of this to get homes ready, albeit it’s more of the in good shape to regive model with a narrow range, rather than for all conditions and items.
Its Facebook also occasionally has item dumps for the community at large. A recent post on its Facebook had free pallets available while another had skis starting at just $25 with a photo of a bucket full of them.
“This thrift store model relies entirely on community donations,” its website indicates. “Recycling these gently used items keeps usable materials out of landfills, provides our neighbors in the community with more affordable materials to maintain and beautify their homes, regularly employs roughly 20 community members, and supports our homeownership program with donated building materials and profits to pay program expenses.”
Its list of items you can bring Wednesdays through Saturdays from 9 to 5 p.m. includes appliances, but not dishwashers and ice makers, new blinds, cabinets, new carpeting, countertops, doors, electrical materials, faucets, flooring, furniture, rust free hardware and tools, heaters, air conditioners, lighting, lumber without nails, framed mirrors, roofing materials, plywood, sheetrock, shelving, new shower heads, skylights, tiles, sinks, wallpaper, windows and yard items.
One model we could look to as inspiration for more of these types of practices locally is part of The Recycling and Reuse Hub in Cincinnati in its appropriately named Lower Price Hill area.
The program which ressembles the Reno subreddit suggestion charges a small fee to take in materials from the community, including broken items.
They then have a group of volunteers called the Tinker Team who try to give discarded items a second life for resale or donation purposes. Items they repair range from coffee makers to toasters, grinders, radios, power strips, vacuum cleaners, crock-pots, lamps, you name it.
The volunteers then show up twice a month to see what they can fix in a fun, shared, collaborative, hands on workspace. Half of the items are usually fixed with ease, a quarter require difficult work and another quarter are usually unfixable. In the latter cases, spare parts are kept for future repairs while everything else is recycled.
Meanwhile, the pile of fixed items goes to organizations who help those in need.
There are items they don’t take such as baby cribs, pianos, books, clothes, trophies, magazines, mattresses, vinyl, furniture, which already have their own established recycling mechanisms.
For wood products, there’s a separate group called Scrap2Home which collects scrap wood normally sent to a dumpster and then the landfill “and use it to build furniture for people who cannot afford to buy it. Every donation helps a family furnish their home, one piece at a time.”
Would you like to see this come to life northern Nevada?
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