Delight for Pensioner at Keep Britain Tidy's Havering Repair Shop

Our latest repair café session in London proved emotional when an 86-year-old man had his old radio cassette player fixed.

Through our Recycle for Your Community project, we are supporting East London Waste Authority (ELWA) to promote and deliver repair cafés around East London.

Keep Britain Tidy's Michaela Main has been working as a senior project manager with ELWA's Waste Prevention Programme during her secondment.

Amazingly our most recent session in the London Borough of Havering on July 16 led to 38 items repaired, 131kg waste prevented and 1,150kg of CO2 emissions prevented!

Our last repair of the day was for resident Mr Hardy, who is 86 years young. 

Mr Hardy brought in his radio cassette player.  The cassette player part has been broken for many years.  

One of the repair team, Ben, worked his magic, talking it through with Mr Hardy as he went along.

After most repairers had packed away, tables and chairs were beginning to be stacked and the teas and coffees had stopped being served, the blissful sound of a cassette started to play!

Ben turned the sound up and the team all applauded! 

Michaela says: "What a fabulous way to end the day.  Mr Hardy was beside himself; he couldn’t believe what Ben had done and said it was better than winning the lottery.  

"Personally, I was holding back the tears. 

"It is easy to get focussed on counting the number of people attending and the number of repairs happening but the social impact that specific repair had for Mr Hardy, for Ben, for Debbie at Havering Council and for myself is totally unmeasurable!"