![]() ![]() “People are increasingly concerned about the environmental cost of fashion,” says Jane Fellner, who runs Loopster. While rental apps may present a welcome disruption to retail’s ownership model, she adds, “it’s not necessarily sustainable if the clothes that are being rented were produced using hazardous chemicals and they’re all made from polyester”. “We also need to put the responsibility on producers, who are making massive amounts of money from this polluting, exploitative wasteful system.” ![]() The initiative, which launched this week, is designed to “power the circular fashion economy” says Joe Metcalfe, Thrift+’s co-founder and chief executive.īut the burden of going green shouldn’t lie only on the consumer, says Emily Macintosh, the policy officer for textiles at the European Environmental Bureau and coordinator of the EEB’s Wardrobe Change campaign, which urges the EC to actively reduce the footprint of textiles sold on the EU market. This is the idea behind the app Thrift+, which lets people send high-quality donations by post to be resold directly to other fashion lovers, with proceeds from each sale going to charity. For Nuw members, seeing their treasured pieces reappear on social media with a new owner creates a sense of intimacy with someone they will never meet. “Our customers get the feeling like they’re going into their friend’s wardrobes, and just picking out things that they like,” says Byrne. ![]() The Irish startup, which is funded by “tech for good” investors, focuses less on the commercial value of clothes than on the emotional significance each garment gathers as it is passed on, and the app includes an impact calculator that lets users track the carbon, waste and water offset created every time they swap. Unlike most rental sites, where users profit – in some cases, greatly – from loaning their luxury items, Nuw members only pay the delivery cost of sending items there’s no rental fee. The social network now has nearly 8,000 members, with 2,500 monthly app users across the UK and Ireland. Nuw’s community quickly outgrew its initial WhatsApp group. ![]() So they started hosting clothes swapping events with like-minded people, using empty Dublin nightclubs. “At university, avoiding fast fashion was really important to us, but we couldn’t really afford any of the alternatives,” Byrne says. After seeing the devastating effects on garment workers while they were volunteering in India, the pair began lobbying for change. Nuw, which Aisling Byrne and friend Alison Kelly co-founded in 2015, was born in response to their guilt about the social and environmental costs of their favourite hobby: shopping. “It’s not enough to use them to clear our wardrobes and our consciences if we’re going to use them as glorified recycling bins, we have to shop from them, too.” “Charity shops need to be a two-way street,” says Bravo. Meanwhile, the charity retailer Barnardo’s reported that goods left outside shops were costing the charity to clear. According to Wrap, an estimated 336,000 tonnes of used clothing gets thrown in the bin in the UK every year. These platforms not only simulate the thrill of finding “new” gems but also offer alternatives to sending unwanted items to landfill or offloading donations at charity shops when they are closed. “Our customers get the feeling they’re just going into their friends’ wardrobes.” Photograph: Abbie Roden ![]()
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