Fashion Monday: The Textile Recycling Project (@ecoDesigns)

The Textile Recycling Project

Every monday, we share a classic garment or textile upcycled product produced by our textile recycling and fashion designing hub. Today, we bring you the Pieces Fabric.
Pieces Fabric is a textile upcycled fabric that is made from textile offcuts. Every week, our trainees collect textile offcuts, size them and stitch them together to produce a 1.5m long Pieces Fabric, which can then be used to design, cut and sew new garments.

These Pieces Fabrics can now be used to sew new garments.

@ecoDesigns is Hive account@thegreens' textile recycling and fashion designing hub that is training women and girls for FREE in Textile Recycling and Fashion Designing in a bid to reduce female unemployment, inequalities and poverty, promote female entrepreneurship, combat textile waste pollution and climate change as well as improve the health and wellbeing of orphans, prisoners, underprivileged and poor people via the donation of free clothes and shoes the hub is collecting from the city.

ecoDesigns was created after our 2017 research that involved over 400 Tailors/Fashion designersin the city of Bamenda, North West Region, Cameroon, were we realized that;

1. They are more than 800 Tailors and Fashion designers in the city, with each tailor generating an average of 2 – 5kg of textile waste per week and more during festive periods. We realized from this research that the tailoring/fashion industry in Bamenda generates about 1600kg to 4000kg of textile waste every week.
2. More than 75% of the tailors/fashion designers burn or throw their textile waste in the landfill and that many of them were unaware of the environmental impact of the textile waste and the textile industry as a whole.

On the other hand, in an oral interview with more than 100 persons from diverse households in the city, we realized that more than 80% of the people burn or throw their old/unwanted or damaged clothes and that not up to 5% of them knew the environmental impact of the textile industry as a whole.
Its against these research backdrops that ecoDesigns was created. The hub currently has 02 Training Directors and 07 women and girls who are learning textile recycling and fashion designing for free.

pioneer graduates of Hive account@ecodesigns with Hive account@mr-greens
The two years old hub has graduated two ecoFashion Designers, collected and upcycled over 12,000 pounds of textile waste into reusable pads, pillows, chalkboard erasers, garments, dolls, mattresses, Laptop bags, scarecrows, etc.

The hub has also collected over 2000 dresses from the city of Bamenda and redistributed to over 300 persons who are internally displaced, orphans, underprivileged, etc.

The Greens is a grassroots environmental organization that strives to educate, inspire and engage young people to take action to combat climate change and be at the forefront of biodiversity conservation and waste management.

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