Swap ’til we drop!
Aim to give shoppers a fashion fix and a greener world
The average UK household owns up to £4000 worth of clothing yet around 30% of our clothing goes unworn.
We use around 2500 gallons (more than 30 bathtubs) of water to manufacture and transport just one pair of jeans. This includes watering the cotton and dying the cloth.
The amount of C02 that goes into creating the clothes in our wardrobe is the same as driving 6000 miles!
If one million people bought or swapped their next item of clothing second-hand we would save 4830 tonnes of C02.
Globally, around 11,000 tonnes of clothing end up in landfill every six minutes.
Extending the lifetime of clothing by buying second-hand, swapping, mending or upcycling would result in 5-10% reduction in carbon, water and waste footprints.
Picture by Andrew Cawley.
MENDING, making do and finding new uses for clothes is nothing new....and The Sunday Post should know – we have all the secrets from the past. We’ve published a book – Pass It On Tips From The 1950s – a collection of domestic hints that were sent to the paper in the 1950s and it has hundreds of ways to recycle, re-make, mend, sew and knit new clothes from old.
There are 1250 tips from the REAL experts, the housewives – your mothers and grandmothers – who got through the austere 1950s with families to feed and clothe.
Want to know how to cut material that’s likely to fray? How to ensure a hem will never come down? How to make sure your knitting never drops a stitch? It’s all here.
To buy the book (£11.99) go to www.dcthomsonshop.co.uk or phone 0800 318 846 during
office hours.