Story and photos by Kaylee Smith, Administrative Program Specialist for Materials Management
My favorite pair of Levi’s jeans have walked a long road, first with my mom in the early 2000s as she juggled motherhood, teaching me to walk, talk, and be a human, and now with me, 20 years later. They’ve endured the pace of two busy women, but they’ve recently been retired to the drawer as the fabric has worn thin.
Though I’m not a seamstress like my mom, who learned from my late grandmother, I’ve always dreamed of knowing how to mend instead of discarding something that means so much to me. That dream became reality this spring at the city of Corvallis’s Planet Palooza event, where I learned to mend at the Repair Fair. Sitting side by side with an inspirational and supportive community volunteer, I learned to patch the thinning fabric myself. It isn’t perfect, but I left not only with a revived pair of jeans, but also with the skills and confidence to tackle repairs in the future.
At OSU, Repair Fairs are more than just a fix-it event; they’re a celebration of community, resilience and sustainability. Started in 2012, alongside the Waste Watchers Club that hosts them, these free events invite students, staff and community members to bring in broken items, from worn-out clothes to malfunctioning electronics and repair them with the help of local volunteers. But it’s not just about fixing things. It’s about empowering people to understand, care for and extend the life of what they already have.
The mission is simple: reduce waste, reuse what you can, save money and build community. This is especially important as the U.S. is rapidly running out of landfill space, and nearly half of active landfills are projected to reach capacity within the next 20 years. Clothing is the most frequently brought item to the Repair Fairs which reflects the 12 million tons of textile waste Americans throw away each year.
Each Repair Fair, held once in fall and once in spring, typically draws 50–80 attendees and has a 70–80% repair success rate. Waste Watchers agreed, despite their busy agendas and upcoming graduations, to add another Repair Fair date into their spring term programming this year, and at Planet Palooza on April 19, 17 of the 24 items brought by over 80 attendees were successfully repaired, including my jeans. Beyond repair tables, Waste Watchers also hosted a “Recycling Right” education station at Planet Palooza, where attendees tested their recycling knowledge by sorting real items into correct bins. This is a hands-on way to tackle the all-too-common issue of recycling contamination, which can send entire bins of recyclables to the landfill. Members also supplied zines (small, self-published magazines) that folks could take home to learn about reuse and waste reduction tips.
These fairs aren’t run by a paid team; they’re powered by student volunteers. Waste Watchers lost their budget and paid staff who had created agendas and carried out most of the programming under Campus Recycling’s Outreach Team since 2012. After the transition from a Department-Sponsored Organization to becoming a Recognized Student Organization in 2022, the club was left in the hands of just three officers, with no advisor support over the summer months when crucial planning occurs, especially preparing recruitment materials and events.
I was hired on as the new Administrative Program Specialist for Campus Recycling in October of 2022. Once I was onboarded, I worked with Waste Watchers’ three officers to get them trained on every administrative process, on how to conduct marketing, on how to use organizational tools and anything else required to run a club.
These students were very involved at OSU, thus the reason they stepped up to become leaders, but they were quite frankly discouraged by the lack of attendance at club meetings and little to no interest from club attendees in becoming officers. There were many heart-to-heart hearts and many conversations about disbanding the club.
Winter became spring, and recruitment activities started up again. Before long, more and more folks started filling up our meeting space and bringing their friends. There weren’t many people, but they came to every single meeting and volunteered for every activity. Everyone would come early and stay late just to hang out despite having double majors and jobs and partners. By week eight, when we asked who would be interested in being an officer next year, the whole room raised their hand. Club President Ella Johansen, with whom I’d had hours of meetings and watched grow into such an amazing leader, looked upon a room of passionate folks raising their hands to prove that the club had been saved.
Now, the persistence of those three passionate students has built the club back up to full meetings of about 15-20 students and seven officers across all majors, putting on not one, but two repair fairs in a term. Those three original leaders often tear up when they reflect on the community they get to call theirs.
At the May Repair Fair, Waste Watcher members will host demonstrations on reuse activities like turning OSU Surplus t-shirts into crochet and macrame yarn or how to make household cleaners without harsh chemicals. The Sustainability in Business Club usually hosts their Plant Propagation Station, where attendees can take home free clippings to root in lab glassware from OSU Surplus, turning would-be waste into something green and growing.
This will be the last Repair Fair for five of our seniors, one of whom will be Ella, and I’ve already started preparing myself for how hard that will be on our not-so-little family of waste nerds. Every Repair Fair leaves our members saying, “That was so fun”, “I can’t wait for the next one”, and “I’m so happy I found this club”. Guests stop and thank us for putting it on, and everyone leaves with a smile, even if their item couldn’t be fixed. Because, Repair Fairs have never just been about the repair; it’s about the people who help you through it.
Every patched seam, each newly rooted plant, every correctly sorted recyclable are much more than small victories; they’re reminders that what we own, what we use, what we throw away all matter. We all have a role to play in doing better. What’s broken isn’t lost; with the right tools, time and people, it can be made whole again. And I cannot thank the Waste Watchers enough for showing me how true that really is. I even have the pants to prove it.
