Lesson: Upcycling & Restoring Old Clothing – 30 mins
• Average american buys 64 new pieces of clothing per year but only half of that are worn 3 times or less; In Canada, each household throws away 46kg of clothing each year
Issue of fast fashion
Solutions
• Shop at thrift stores instead! You can buy affordable used clothes (that have been washed and properly sorted) and you can even sell some clothes that you don’t want too.
• You can find some expensive brand clothes at thrift stores for half of the price! (ex: Nike sweatpants are $90 but $40 at thrift stores)
46KG
• That’s a lot of clothes being wasted each year!! Why is this bad for the environment? What can we do to reduce this amount of waste?
Here's how it hurts the environment:
• The high amount of clothes that get thrown out to landfills creates more garbage and produces a large number of greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, textile production created more greenhouse gas emissions than international flights and maritimes shipping combined in 2015.
• Fabric production also takes up a lot of water, oil and damages forests.
Thrift
• Upcycle your clothes means you can turn old/used clothes that you don’t wear anymore into something useful. You can tur clothes into tote bags, using them as rags/cleaning supplies, or into pillowcases/rugs. The options are endless! Or if you don’t like how your jeans look anymore you can improve them by learning embroidery/painting them to make them new and unique!
• Donate clothes or hand them down to your younger sibling or cousin if they want it. Make sure to tell them about the high number of clothes in landfills so they’ll be encouraged to give it to someone else when they grow out of those clothes)
Upcycle
• You can also help reduce waste by just wearing your clothes longer (if they still fit you. By just by wearing your clothes 9 months longer can reduce your carbon footprint for that garment by 30%!!
• If everyone bought one used item instead of new, it could save nearly 6 pounds of CO2 emissions which is equivalent to removing half a million cars off the road for a year
Donate