Re-Use Austria
In May, Helvetia Insurance in Austria and RepaNet, the re-use and repair network Austria, signed a cooperation for the future. Helvetia offers Repair Cafés a free, tailor-made insurance package and protects volunteers from consequential damage caused by unsuccessful repairs. At a joint repair event in the Ottakring recycling cosmos, Helvetia and RepaNet presented their cooperation.
RepaNet is a non-profit association that acts as a platform for voluntary repair initiatives, so-called Repair Cafés, and represents their interests. In the Repair Cafés, defective everyday items such as irons, bicycles or coffee machines are repaired, or items of clothing such as torn jeans are restored. Repair is done together, which means volunteer helpers share their knowledge and know-how with the visitors and instruct them both to repair their defective everyday objects. In this way, repair culture is kept alive together in a cozy coffee house atmosphere.
In the spring of 2021, a cooperation was concluded with Helvetia to support the volunteer helpers at the Repair Cafés. Helvetia offers them a free insurance solution so that they can contribute to the repair of defective devices without hesitation. For this year, 20 Repair Cafés have already registered to take advantage of the Helvetiain insurance solution - Helvetia naturally offers this for everyone, currently around 150 Repair Cafés in Austria.
The unifying value: sustainability
Both RepaNet and Helvetia see sustainability as a holistic approach with ecological, economic and social aspects and want their actions to make a sustainable contribution to society and environmental performance. Even on a small scale, you can achieve great things and every repair is another sustainable step.
»For us as an insurance company, the issues of sustainability and the long-term are essential and closely related to our core business. We can fully support the idea of reusing instead of throwing away. We decided to cooperate with RepaNet because the Repair Cafés help conserve resources and so we can also make a contribution to it, ”says Werner Panhauser, Member of the Management Board for Sales & Marketing at Helvetia Austria.
»Helvetia's corporate culture and its commitment to corporate responsibility, as it has shown for years in its protective forest initiative and in the» Further fair evaluation «project, are an excellent fit for our approaches. That is why we made a conscious decision to partner with Helvetia and are very happy to be working together. Thanks to the insurance package, which is ideally tailored to the needs of the initiatives, our volunteers can now repair safely and insured «, reports Matthias Neitsch, Managing Director of RepaNet.
CO2 savings, waste avoidance and resource conservation
Solutions to reduce resource consumption are in great demand, because if the entire world population lived like the average person in Austria, more than 3½ planets would be needed to provide the required resources. The Repair Cafés actively contribute to waste avoidance and resource conservation.
Repair Cafés do valuable work for the deputy district heads Barbara Obermaier and Eva Weissmann. »By repairing you save resources and extend the service life of products. Not only does it reduce waste, it also makes an active contribution to climate protection, ”emphasizes Weissmann. Obermaier adds: “In addition, it is also a nice feeling to repair your own things yourself. And that with the help of volunteers in a relaxed atmosphere - a win-win situation for everyone involved. «There are a total of around 150 Repair Cafés throughout Austria, which thanks to their repair successes save around 900 tons of CO2 equivalents per year.
You can find a video interview with Werner Panhauser, Director Sales and Marketing Helvetia Austria, about the cooperation here on YouTube.
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