04 Jun 2025
Meet Rondi, Juliet, Hana, Carrie and Katie. Five women who have never met each other before came together a couple of months ago with a goal in mind. To stop clothing in St Albans heading for landfill.
We are all worried about the impact fast fashion is having on the planet. We love fashion—but not the waste that comes with it.
Every year in the UK: 350,000 tonnes of clothing that could be reused ends up in landfill, that’s about £140 million worth of clothes thrown away and most of it is worn just seven times or less before being discarded.
And once it’s discarded it often gets shipped abroad to poorer countries. Take Ghana for example, where there are 15 million people, yet they receive 30 million items of clothing there a week! They cannot deal with it all, and lots of it ends up dumped on the beaches washing into the sea.
So we decided to run a clothes swap event to see if there was any interest.
Clothes swaps are a fun, affordable, and impactful way to do something about it. By swapping instead of buying new, you keep clothes in circulation for longer, save money while refreshing your wardrobe, help reduce textile waste and the environmental harm it causes and join a community movement towards more conscious fashion.
We had barely advertised but ended up having to double our online ticket booking it was so popular! We had over 100 people signed up to attend. We are hugely grateful to WasteAware Hertfordshire (Veolia) who lent us clothing rails and hangers, and also to St Albans district council who supported the event and provided the location.
This was very much a pilot – none of us had ever organised a clothes swap before, so we are now gathering feedback and meeting for a debrief with a view to planning the next one as there’s obviously a demand. Plus we’re looking forward to meeting up again.
Juliet, local councillor, said: “We want to normalise the swapping of clothes, we all have items we no longer wear, and this is an ideal way to trade in some items for different ones. We’d like to aim at doing one of these quarterly so if anyone would like to join the volunteer group please get in touch.”
We are:
Rondi Allan – Sustainable X
Carrie Cook – Sustainable St Albans
Hana Rathouska Leonard – Vinted expert
Katie Carr – Tommy & Lottie clothing
Juliet Voisey – Green councillor and St Albans Greenpeace
To get involved with future swaps, contact Cllr.J.Voisey@councillor.stalbans.gov.uk
