Oxfam's #Secondhandseptember
In September 2019, an incredible 62,000 people pledged to say no to new clothes for 30 days. As part of Oxfam’s #secondhandseptember campaign, Alice Wilby of Novel Beings and I like to think we played a part in that.
Every week, in the UK, 11 million items of clothing end up in landfill; at the end of the year, the total amount would weigh as much as the Empire State Building. Fashion is resource-intensive - it would take 13 years to drink the water needed to make ONE cotton t-shirt and a pair of jeans - and it is polluting: laundry of synthetic textiles (34.8%) is the largest source of release of primary microplastics to the world’s oceans.
Meanwhile, fashion’s contribution to climate change is significant. The apparel industry alone represents 6.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions emissions, equivalent to about 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 (almost the current estimate of the fossil CO2 emission of the EU).
How? Well, buying just one white cotton shirt produces the same amount of emissions as driving 35 miles in a car. And new research by Oxfam showed that in one month alone, the carbon footprint of new clothes bought in the UK was greater than flying a plane around the world 900 times.
Throwaway fashion is killing our planet, its people, its animals; it’s utterly unsustainable. But one of the solutions is simple: go secondhand.
When Oxfam invited Alice and I to its Milton Point warehouse to create a series of short campaign films, we were thrilled to help out. We’d been to the warehouse before - to photograph the charity’s 2017 online campaign - and the size of it and the wealth of secondhand clothing available never fails to impress.
If you managed to say no to new for 30 days during Secondhand September and would like to keep going, visit oxfam.org.uk .
