North London Waste Authority (NLWA) is combating textile waste with its new campaign that will allow residents to swap unwanted clothes in a Covid-friendly manner. NLWA has been working with London Waste and Recycling Board’s (LWARB) sustainable fashion campaign, ‘Love Not Landfill’, on the ‘Stop & Swap’ initiative. Stop & Swap will involve online clothes swap events and talks on social media platform Instagram Live, with the overall goal of encouraging North London locals to reduce the amount of unwanted clothing going to landfill.
Hosting the functions online allows the continuation of conscious consumption, even with Covid-19 restrictions making swapping and shopping more challenging. The virus already forced NLWA to revise its original Residual Waste Reduction Plan back in March. Chair of NLWA, Cllr Clyde Loakes, said: “NLWA is committed to helping people find ways to live more sustainably, and even though the pandemic is creating great challenges, we cannot afford to lose momentum on tackling the climate emergency.
The Stop & Swap campaign follows a dramatic increase in textile waste that came after the first national lockdown brought about by Covid-19 – in June, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) warned that the UK was on track to clear out 67 million clothes after the lockdown ended. This forecast gave impetus to behaviour change charity Hubbub to call on the UK Government to introduce a charge for every non-recyclable item of clothing sold, as part of the UK’s Covid-19 recovery programme.
Source: Resource
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