In a dark and cavernous building yesterday, amongst hundreds of other people I popped my clothes swapping cherry. As blogged about a couple of weeks back, Carriageworks in Sydney were hosting a massive clothing swap event as part of their 3 day Exchange for Change event focusing on sustainability practices in fashion and highlighting the ethical consequences behind our need for the latest designer item. According to their website, the benefits of swapping are as follows:
- Recycling takes items you have finished with and puts them back into circulation.
- By passing your clothes, accessories or equipment on to others, you are diverting materials from landfill thus conserving resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
- Reusing a product, rather than buying a new one, reduces the demands for water, energy and raw materials. This reduces the impact on the environment.
- Swapping 1 suitcase (20kg) of clothes saves enough energy to run a TV non-stop for 1.7 years.
- Swapping clothing diverts these organic materials from landfill. In landfill they produce methane, a greenhouse gas with the global warming capacity 20 times stronger than CO2.
For me, I was stoked to pick up six items (3 skirts, 3 pairs of shoes) in exchange for clothing that has been gathering dust at the back of my cupboard for years – one dress that had never been worn! And the event itself was quite fun although I was disappointed in the quality of alot of the items as some people had brought along things that were well worn and probably more suited for the charity bin. Hopefully next year their will be better quality items either from the event organisers being more stringent or people getting more into the spirit of the swap more.
Did anyone go along to the swap? What did you think?
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