The Reuse Alliance runs a permanent Reuse Hub in Petaluma and free traveling Repair Fairs booked through January across North Bay main streets — where a volunteer fixes your lamp, bike or jacket while you watch.

On a fall Saturday, if you have a dead lamp or a bike with a seized chain, there is now a standing answer in the North Bay: carry it in, and someone will try to fix it while you watch. The Reuse Alliance (external source, opens in a new tab), a Sonoma County nonprofit, runs free Repair Fairs where each visitor is paired with a volunteer "repair coach" who works the item — textiles, lamps, small appliances, bikes — and teaches the owner along the way. You have to stay with your thing. That's the point.

The circuit is booked out into next year, and it reads like a tour of North Bay main streets: Fairfax on Sept. 12, Novato on Oct. 10, Santa Rosa on Nov. 14, Petaluma on Nov. 21, and San Rafael on Jan. 9 (external source, opens in a new tab), with stops in Healdsburg, Rohnert Park–Cotati and Windsor in between. Marin City hosted one Aug. 15. A single fair, by the group's own tally, can serve 100-plus people, fix 50-plus items and divert 500-plus pounds from the landfill in a matter of hours.

The permanent version sits in Petaluma. The Reuse Alliance — headquartered at 2200 Petaluma Blvd. N. — runs a brick-and-mortar Reuse Hub at the Petaluma Village Premium Outlets, open five days a week according to Zero Waste Marin (external source, opens in a new tab), with repair consultations by appointment and a rotating schedule of lamp-repair, soldering, bike-maintenance and hand-mending workshops (external source, opens in a new tab). One wrinkle worth flagging: a San Francisco Chronicle opinion column this week placed that Hub in Corte Madera, but the nonprofit's own listings put the storefront in Petaluma, with Corte Madera only among the towns that have hosted a traveling fair.

The renewed attention traces to that column, by writer Allison Arieff, who set the fairs against a grim backdrop. Arieff writes that Californians landfill nearly 45 million tons of trash a year — including roughly 1.2 million tons of textiles, up to 95% of which could have been reused or repaired — and that the shoe-repair trade has fallen from about 100,000 U.S. shops in the 1930s to roughly 5,000 today. That collapse is part of why "fix it" so often now means "replace it."

What a fair actually looks like is smaller than the statistics: a folding table, a soldering iron, a line of people holding broken objects they'd been told to throw out. Whether it hardens into something permanent in more towns is an open question — one organizer told Arieff the demand could support a full-time operation if someone took on the fundraising. For now, the answer is a storefront in Petaluma and a calendar of Saturdays working its way south into Marin.