5th June marks World Environment Day, a global moment to focus the attention of businesses, investors, governments, communities, and individuals on the urgent need to restore the Earth’s eco-systems.
TRAID’s contribution is to support the UK public to source more of their wardrobe second-hand and pass on clothes in our charity shops, while funding global projects that benefit the people and places making our clothes. A sustainable, circular model that priorities social and environmental capital, and the well-being of people and planet.
More people than ever before are aware of the devastating socio-environmental impacts of the global fashion industry (check out TRAID’s fact sheets) including pollution, waste, and a dependence on cheap exploitative labour and they want an alternative. How do we clothes ourselves, and enjoy fashion, without propping up such a brutal and harmful business model?
TRAID’s solution is to go second-hand. Now. It’s a practical sustainable alternative to buying new, and an action you can take right away to adopt a more sustainable way of living.
Over-consumption is stripping the Earth of its resources and ability to regenerate. For the future of our planet, this insatiable demand on rapidly diminishing resources – from land to water – cannot continue. So many powerful benefits flow from going second-hand: –
- Reducing consumption
- Reducing our use of scarce resources
- Reducing waste and carbon emissions
- Placing more value on the things we already have
- Extending the life cycle of wearable clothes (and other products)
- Sourcing clothes in more creative, interesting and socially beneficial ways such as charity shops (like TRAID), swapping, renting and making
It is also a radical act. Saying no to fast fashion and increasing our use of second-hand clothes transforms us from individual consumers into collective citizens re-connecting us with communities and people, rather than material objects, and loosening the grip of fast fashion corporations on shaping our style and identity.
#secondhandfirst
