Photo Credit: ThreadForward Initiative
Making a difference doesn’t always require a lot of money or social clout. Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of energy and community involvement.
A few students at Lake Oswego High School in Oregon decided to take action against the changing climate with the creation of a club called the Thread Forward Initiative. Founded by students Alexa Shum, Auveen Shafaei, and Elise Schmidt, the club’s mission is to organize clothing swaps and upcycling events to reduce the effects of fast fashion locally.
“We thought it was a good place to take action and make a difference, not just our school but our community,” Schmidt told the Lake Oswego Review. “We started thinking about what our community needs and the things our community enjoys participating in.”
The students noticed that the current resale market could actually be less accessible than fast-fashion giants like Shein and Temu, encouraging trend-driven shoppers to shop internationally instead of locally and sustainably. To be able to encourage sustainable action in their student body, they eliminated the financial barrier with their swap events.
“We wanted to make sure that by making the clothes free, that anybody who was just passing by would be able to find one or two things that they wanted,” Shum told the Review.
The Thread Forward Initiative has successfully held one upcycling event and one sewing event in which every item included was either swapped or upcycled. In total, it saved 92 items from going to a landfill.
While the numbers might seem small compared to a large organization, it’s important to understand how many resources are used to create basic clothing items. It takes 2,700 liters of water to create one cotton shirt, and a pair of jeans generates as many polluting gases as a car driving 80 miles, according to the World Resources Institute. If the items swapped were nonbiodegradable, they saved items from sitting in a landfill for up to 200 years.
The number of times a garment is worn has gone down, and in the last 15 years, international sales have doubled. There’s a direct correlation to the fact that fast-fashion items are made to quickly deteriorate.
If you want to break up with fast fashion, check out this guide. You can also learn how to shop more sustainably by shopping with partners that help you recycle old garments or send in your donated items to Trashie.
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