UPDATE: This event has been canceled. Stay tuned to the Boomerang Bags Facebook page for events in the spring.
250 old t-shirts have been diverted from landfill, collected, printed with the Boomerang Bags logo. Are in need of a quick sew and BOOM! They’ll be up cycled into reusable grocery bags available for that palm-to-forehead moment when you realize you forgot yours.
Fran and Leah promise this will be a short, fun and satisfying event. Please come and help out. Great for first time sewers and community minded folks. Bring a sewing machine. There’s plenty of thread.
If you’re on the fence, consider these facts about fashion, shared recently by the World Economic Forum:
- The fashion industry causes 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than all international flights and shipping combined.
- Every second, one garbage truck full of textiles is burned or sent to landfills.
- 3/5 items bought are thrown away within a year!
- Washing one synthetic garment releases about 2000 plastic microfibres which enter the ocean and the food chain.
- It takes 2700 litres of water to make one cotton shirt! That’s what one person drinks in 2.5 years.
- Making and washing one pair of jeans emits the same CO2 as driving 111 kilometres.
- 120 million trees are cut down every year to make clothes. 30% of the rayon and viscose used in fashion comes from endangered and ancient forests.
- Up to 16% of the world’s pesticides are used in cotton farming every year.
We don’t have to feel despondent in the face of this. We can wear our threads bare… We can love what we wear… we can dress our kids in hand-me-downs and shop the thrift stores ourselves, and pass along things that don’t work for our size anymore, and we can upcycle (cut old clothes into rags for cleaning) wherever we can. We can also just say not no to stupid things like pantyhose. (Haha. Just expressing pent up frustration at a ridiculous private girls’s school uniform I was once tormented by…) Initiatives like Boomerang Bags right here in Pemberton gives us a chance to make a difference, and be part of a positive community collective.
