Sidmouth Repair Café has saved half a tonne of waste from the rubbish dump in the last seven months, and avoided 1.6 tonnes of carbon emissions.

It has also saved its ‘customers’ a total of £4,614, representing the amount they would have spent buying new items rather than bringing old ones back into use.

The numbers have been calculated by software that uses data on the cost of waste disposal, the price of new items, the emissions produced by manufacturing them and other factors.

The figures showing the Sidmouth Repair Café's impact – particularly its environmental benefits - have been described as ‘pretty amazing’ by one of its founders, Angie Carney.

Sidmouth Repair Café is supported by Devon’s Community Action Groups (CAG), an organisation working with local groups to help them carry out activities around waste reduction, composting, sharing, re-use and repair. The CAG also supports surplus food redistribution, litter picks and tree planting. It uses the software, called Resource Community Impact Tracker, to assess the value of the groups’ work.

After each of the Repair Café sessions, volunteer team member Ron feeds the information on the number and type of all the items repaired into the software, and it works out the financial and environmental value of that session. It also calculates the value of the volunteers’ time – which has totalled £10,494 so far this year.

What the software does not measure is the other benefits of Sidmouth Repair Café, which the Community Action Group is keen to emphasise. Helen Vines, the CAG Devon Project Manager, said: “Repair skills are being shared and retained (and it couldn’t happen without SRC’s wonderful volunteers), stuff is being given longer or new life, money is being saved for those people whose items are repaired (especially important at the moment), and a lovely social activity in the centre of Sidmouth is bringing folk of all ages together.”

The Sidmouth Repair Café is now taking its summer break, and there will be no session this Saturday. It will return on Saturday, September 24 at the usual time of 10am to 1pm at the Manstone Road Youth Centre.