TRAID - Textile Recycling for Aid and International Development
- A charity working to wear poverty out
- Collects the public's unwanted clothes for reuse and resale in their charity shops
- Their work has powerful environmental and social returns
- Encourage the public to reuse/recycle textiles rather than throwing them away, this shrinks waste and our carbon footprint
3 Objectives
1) Divert the UK public from contributing to landfill and encouraging them to reuse and recycle their textile waste
2) Challenging global poverty, exploitation and environmental degradation across the textile supply chain
3) Fund an education programme
Statistics
- We discard around 1.2 million tonnes of waste per year
- We spend £40 billion on clothes per year
- Through landfill, clothing is lost, causing environmental problems such as releasing a greenhouse gas called Methane, this is responsible for 20% of the Greenhouse Effect
- Traid has 1,600 textile banks across the country and this is their main way to collect garments
- However problems with collecting in a textile bank are theft, vandalism, upkeep and competition
- They also collect through cardboard banks in store, however these get damaged and people do not necessarily carry unwanted clothes with them whilst shopping
- Additionally, they do bespoke door to door collections which are successful but there are collection/travel costs
What happens to the donated clothing?
- Goes to the warehouse where it is hand sorted on a belt and decided what can be resold
- Only between 14-18% is sellable again in the UK
- However, the rest is still recycled and sold to a wholesaler
- The clothes are sorted into categories such as Kids, Casuals, Trends
- Traid make more money from bespoke collection rather from the textile banks are 50% of clothes donated are reusable
Stores
- There are 11 Traid shops in London, all in very different areas
- They tailor the ranges to the different shops with different styles and price points such as premium, lower end/basics
- This technique helps make them successful
- Traid makes more money than any other charity shop in the UK, as they are packed full of clothes and have good in-store visual merchandising
Traid Remade
- Traid Remade is where a designer reworks clothes that are damage or unsellable for Traid to then sell on
- These reworked pieces do well in their higher end stores
- 60% of secondhand clothing bought displaces the chance of new clothes bought
Written by Rebecca Phoenix
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