• 

  SHWOPING!!

  I went to the launch of shwopping on brick lane, it was incredible they had covered buildings froms head to toe in 2nd hand clothing.
  
  Shwopping is about bringing an old item of clothing into an M&S store with you (even if it’s not from M&S) each time you come to buy something new. You can put your old items into a ‘Shwop Drop’ box (you’ll find these by the tills in most stores). All clothing goes to our partners Oxfam and then they either resell it in one of their stores or on their website, forward it on to those who need it in the Third World, or recycle the fibres to make new material (which businesses like M&S can make into new clothes). Absolutely nothing goes to landfill. Oxfam will use the money raised to help people around the world overcome poverty.
• All clothes shwopped at M&S are given to Oxfam. Oxfam then:
• • Resells clothes – in shops, online, at festivals or through overseas enterprises, like Frip Ethique in Senegal.
• • Reuses clothes – garments that can’t be worn again are sold to designers who restyle them for use in new collections.
• • Recycles clothes – even if they don’t make the grade, old clothes are never sent to landfill. Instead, they’re sold in bulk to reprocessing companies where they could be reborn as mattress filling, carpet underlay or as a last resort, incinerated. Some of the garments will even be turned in to new fibres for use in new garments.
• • Not a stitch is wasted – every penny raised helps fight poverty around the world.

What is the issue with clothes going into landfill?
• Approximately 500,000 tonnes or 1 billion items of clothing are sent to landfill each year - that’s 114,000 per hour. Neither the planet’s landfill sites, nor its resources, are infinite and we know that placing unwanted clothing items into the bin (and therefore into landfill) when they could be recycled or re-used – is not sustainable. We hope this project will help see a move away from ‘disposable’ fashion where we throw away clothes when we’ve had enough of them.

• Shwopping is about challenging and changing the way we all shop. We’re not asking you to stop buying clothes, rather aiming to create a ‘buy one, give one’ culture, where reusing, recycling or reselling old clothes becomes the norm. Half a million tonnes of clothing end up in UK landfill every year and we all agree this can’t continue. So instead of storing up problems for tomorrow, M&S is calling on the UK to become a nation of shwoppers, where we breathe new life into and reuse old wardrobe favourites.
  
  http://www.marksandspencer.com/FAQ-Shwop/b/1723541031