Did you know that:
- Of all the clothes in your wardrobe, 1 out of 3 pieces are never worn by you?
- We throw away a lot of clothes in The Netherlands. About 124 million kilograms annually!
- By throwing away clothes prematurely and replacing them, consumers globally waste an amount of 460 billion dollars annually.
- On average we buy 60% more clothes compared to earlier times, and we only wear them half as long.
- The clothing sector uses 93 billion cubical meters of water every year.
Clothing has to be designed in a different way, and it needs to be worn longer. Moreover, the industry should strive for maximum recycling. This is stated by a report of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. According to the authors of the report, this is the only way to avoid that the global fashion industry will demand one quater of the annual emission of carbon dioxide by the middle of this century.
The best recycling method is of course the 1 to 1 exchange of second-hand clothes. But second-hand clothing generally has a bad image. People think of second-hand clothes as dirty, or it is considered shabby, because it seems you cannot afford new clothes. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is not dirty, because sold second-hands clothes are always clean and washed. Also, poverty has nothing to do with it, because after all nobody can tell whether you bought a new or second-hand piece of clothing. It is in fact cool to be sustainable and to show this by buying second-hand clothes every now and then.
Right now we want to make people from Nijmegen more aware of the benefits of second-hand clothing, and we want to remove its bad image. Three Master students from the Radboud University did research on second-hand clothing and identity on our behalf. More information about this will follow under the heading SCHOONE KLEEDJES.
We would also like to involve schools in this project as much as possible, to establish a lively trade on schools. During the project SCHOONE KLEEDJES, we will organize a SWAP WEEK.
