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Sunday 8 March 2009
Tuesday 13 January 2009
Recycling in Cardiff gets Re-vamped
When Cardiff's food waste recycling packs arrived on the city's doorsteps in October 2008, it was hailed as a breakthrough in sustainable city living. But Rebecca Clark, 26, wasn’t buying the hype. “The scheme is great but it’s not enough,” she says. “You can send people the boxes, bags and leaflets on how to use them, but it doesn't mean they're going to read them. How many people just put everything in their cupboards and forgot about it? More needs to be done to reach those people.” Frustrated at the Council’s approach, she took matters into her own hands and embarked on an ambitious plan to educate the city about green living – beginning with the fickle world of fashion.
Rebecca staged Re-Vamp, the city’s first ever large-scale clothes swapping and customisation event, as an antidote to the 'Fast Fashion' phenomenon. Cheaply-produced, poorly-made, stack-‘em-high-sell-‘em-low garments sold by the likes of Primark encourage wastefulness in shoppers. With textiles now making up over 1% of the 330 million tonnes of waste the UK produces every year, Re-Vamp’s first event in November 2008 aimed to educate people about recycling and also featured ‘pedal-powered bingo’ to demonstrate renewable energy.
Rebecca staged Re-Vamp, the city’s first ever large-scale clothes swapping and customisation event, as an antidote to the 'Fast Fashion' phenomenon. Cheaply-produced, poorly-made, stack-‘em-high-sell-‘em-low garments sold by the likes of Primark encourage wastefulness in shoppers. With textiles now making up over 1% of the 330 million tonnes of waste the UK produces every year, Re-Vamp’s first event in November 2008 aimed to educate people about recycling and also featured ‘pedal-powered bingo’ to demonstrate renewable energy.
“My friends and I are quite environmentally aware and often meet up to swap clothes and customise them together,” she says. “Then one day I just thought ‘Why not do this on a larger scale?’” The first event, held in November 2008, was bigger than she ever imagined – over 200 people attended and between them swapped over a thousand garments, all of which may well have ended up on a landfill site otherwise. “We’re still a materialistic society, which is why it was so successful – people like getting clothes for free. But I think we can exploit this to teach people about changing their lifestyles.”
Several organisers took on seamstress roles at the event, demonstrating how to adjust and customize garments, and a ‘Re-vamped fashion show’ was staged featuring a variety of exotic outfits crafted from second-hand fabrics. Rebecca is a believer in the power of actively demonstrating sustainable living - something she feels is missing from current education schemes. “It’s not enough to simply lecture people about recycling, you have to show them how to do it,” she states.
Helen Smith, 26, who assisted with the workshops at the event, agrees that education needs to improve. “It’s really simple to re-use and customise fabrics, but people don’t have the skills to do this,” she says. Helen runs her own environmentally-friendly accessories label, Recycled With Love, but is quick to point out that recycling alone isn't enough. “It’s great to recycle waste, but we shouldn’t actually be producing such a volume of waste in the first place! Everyone’s lifestyles need to change dramatically. Education needs to start early on.”
A council spokesman claimed they already have schemes in place for recycling education. “We run roadshows and do door-to-door visits, but beyond this there’s little we can do. No fines exist for people who fail to recycle, as is the case in other countries, so people should take this issue up with central government,” they stated. But Rebecca is is unsure if fines alone are the answer. “We should give people an incentive rather than a punishment. People think it's difficult and a chore to be sustainable, but that's not true.”
Rebecca now plans to use Re-vamp as a springboard for bigger schemes. “I worked for a solar-powered café at various festivals over the summer and was really inspired by their work,” she says. “We want to build bigger and more varied workshops, not just on clothes but on all angles of sustainable living. Eventually I’d love to have a permanent studio space in Cardiff to use as an education centre.”
Just two weeks after the first Re-vamp the environmental secretary, Ed Miliband, called for large-scale ‘popular mobilisation’ in the style of the Suffragettes to tackle climate change. Around the country people are waking up to green issues and questioning our lifestyles, yet there is no national movement to unite them and place pressure on the government. It is campaigns like Rebecca's that empower people to take action and fight for change, and as grassroots campaigns mushroom around the UK we could be seeing the seeds of Milliband's called-for movement begin to sprout. But for now Rebecca is taking things one step at a time, with another Re-vamp planned for March and a guest stall at the University's sustainability fayre. "In other cultures [recycling] isn't an effort for people, it's built into their routines," she says. "That's something we're going to have to get over in this country. That's the jump we need to make."
Several organisers took on seamstress roles at the event, demonstrating how to adjust and customize garments, and a ‘Re-vamped fashion show’ was staged featuring a variety of exotic outfits crafted from second-hand fabrics. Rebecca is a believer in the power of actively demonstrating sustainable living - something she feels is missing from current education schemes. “It’s not enough to simply lecture people about recycling, you have to show them how to do it,” she states.
Helen Smith, 26, who assisted with the workshops at the event, agrees that education needs to improve. “It’s really simple to re-use and customise fabrics, but people don’t have the skills to do this,” she says. Helen runs her own environmentally-friendly accessories label, Recycled With Love, but is quick to point out that recycling alone isn't enough. “It’s great to recycle waste, but we shouldn’t actually be producing such a volume of waste in the first place! Everyone’s lifestyles need to change dramatically. Education needs to start early on.”
A council spokesman claimed they already have schemes in place for recycling education. “We run roadshows and do door-to-door visits, but beyond this there’s little we can do. No fines exist for people who fail to recycle, as is the case in other countries, so people should take this issue up with central government,” they stated. But Rebecca is is unsure if fines alone are the answer. “We should give people an incentive rather than a punishment. People think it's difficult and a chore to be sustainable, but that's not true.”
Rebecca now plans to use Re-vamp as a springboard for bigger schemes. “I worked for a solar-powered café at various festivals over the summer and was really inspired by their work,” she says. “We want to build bigger and more varied workshops, not just on clothes but on all angles of sustainable living. Eventually I’d love to have a permanent studio space in Cardiff to use as an education centre.”
Just two weeks after the first Re-vamp the environmental secretary, Ed Miliband, called for large-scale ‘popular mobilisation’ in the style of the Suffragettes to tackle climate change. Around the country people are waking up to green issues and questioning our lifestyles, yet there is no national movement to unite them and place pressure on the government. It is campaigns like Rebecca's that empower people to take action and fight for change, and as grassroots campaigns mushroom around the UK we could be seeing the seeds of Milliband's called-for movement begin to sprout. But for now Rebecca is taking things one step at a time, with another Re-vamp planned for March and a guest stall at the University's sustainability fayre. "In other cultures [recycling] isn't an effort for people, it's built into their routines," she says. "That's something we're going to have to get over in this country. That's the jump we need to make."
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