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Second-hand September is a campaign encouraging people to avoid buying new clothes for the entire month of September. The goal is to raise awareness about the environmental impact of fast fashion and to promote more sustainable consumption habits.
When we think about activities that have a negative impact on the environment, we often focus on how we travel, what we eat and how we heat our homes. What we wear is sometimes overlooked.
The truth is that very few people are aware of the environmental impact of our clothes. In fact, research from Keep Northern Ireland Beautiful commissioned in 2022 found that just 4% of people in the region recognise that the production and consumption of clothing and textiles is harmful to our environment.
It’s not ordinary people that are to blame for this. As an industry, fashion has done a fantastic job at dressing up its carbon footprint. Big fashion has not been honest about its environmental impact or transparent about where and how clothes are made, including the treatment and conditions of garment workers making them.
Let’s look behind the label of the average pair of jeans. Jeans are a garment worn by half of the world’s population every day, and just over one BILLION pairs are produced every year. Jeans are made from genetically modified cotton, a very thirsty crop. This is why it takes around 7,500 litres of water to make a single pair of jeans, according to the United Nations. Dyeing the cotton fibres then involves toxic chemicals, many of which end up polluting waterways during the dyeing process.
These same synthetic fibres, which jeans are made of, do not decompose, and billions of pairs of jeans end up dumped in landfill. Landfills generate an obvious waste problem and are extremely hazardous to the environment: contaminating water supplies, emitting greenhouse gases, and posing a threat to the health of those who live and work nearby.
Jeans are just one example of a type of clothing that we wear. When we take a closer look at the typical life cycle of a pair of jeans – from production to disposal – it becomes easier to understand why fashion, as an industry, is so carbon intensive, water intensive and resource intensive.
This is why campaigns, like Second-hand September, are important, helping us to reduce waste, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and promote a more circular economy.
In Northern Ireland, only 17% shoppers normally buy second-hand clothing on a regular basis. But over 60% said that they would like to explore buying preloved rather than brand new.
This is where the members of Northern Ireland Resources Network (NIRN) can help.
Instead of going to your high street store, you can shop pre-loved from NIRN members across the country. Hope 365 is a Northern Irish charity and NIRN member working with vulnerable children in Ethiopia who have 3 charity shops in Antrim, Larne and Ballyclare. Limavady Communicty Development Initiative, Hands That Talk, British Heart Foundation and St Vincent de Paul all have local charity shops across Northern Ireland where second-hand garments are sold at a much cheaper price tag. The Playtrail in Derry has a thrift charity shop and textile bank where you can donate clothing for re-use.
NIRN will be sharing their journey through Second-hand September and promoting the campaign on social media to inspire as many people as possible across Northern Ireland to get involved, and to raise the profile of reusing, repair and re-wearing our clothes.
Get in touch and let us know how you get on during Second-hand September. There are so many ways to get involved during the month, whether that be buying no new clothes, sharing information about the campaign on social media, repairing a garment that needs mending, swapping clothes with a friend or supporting your local charity shop.
You can still love fashion – but in a way that shows care and respect to the planet too.
