Latest news with #SuaySewShop
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Or Foundation, Suay Partner to Tackle Textile Waste in Ghana, L.A.
It's the collaboration the fashion industry didn't know it needed. Forged in the heat of not one but two cataclysmic fires, seven days and 7,600 miles apart, the partnership between The Or Foundation in Ghana and Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles seeks to address what the organizations describe as the 'disaster after the disasters': the inundation of castoff clothing from well-meaning donors that so overwhelmed California's aid centers that they spilled into the streets, and the destruction of critical infrastructure in Accra's Kantamanto Market that has backed up a major pipeline for the global North's unwanted garments, leaving them with few other places to go. More from Sourcing Journal California's Organized Retail Crime Task Force Recovered $13.5M in Stolen Merchandise Last Year Pact Group and BlockTexx Partner on Fashion Recycling in Australia Circ Raises $25M in Oversubscribed Round led by Taranis While Liz Ricketts, executive director of The Or Foundation and Lindsay Rose Medoff, CEO of Suay, have known each other for years—'pre-Covid,' Ricketts offered—their extended distance and busy schedules made it challenging for their teams to physically connect. When the fires happened, throwing into the sharpest of relief their shared reality of too much textile waste and not enough outlets to manage it responsibly, they realized this had to get together. And quickly. On Sunday, the two organizations came together in Suay's downtown Los Angeles retail shop and production facility to announce '100,000 Bags for Climate Change,' complete with an installation of the snarled clothing 'tentacles' that have become an indelible part of Accra's coastlines. The initiative is both a way to tackle 120,000 pounds of so-called 'disaster relief' clothing that Medoff and her crew have picked up over the past three months and a call to action to fund what she and Ricketts say must be a 'systems change' in textile recirculation based on community-centered solutions. The climate change part is self-evident: Fashion overproduction is part of the reason rising temperatures are powering extreme weather events that increase the risk of wildfires. 'Most people were surprised to see the tentacles in person, realizing that fast fashion's harm isn't just what's visible it's also what's invisible: the chemicals, harmful dyes, polyester and the long-term damage to our bodies,' said Nutifafa Mensah, peer education lead at The Or Foundation, who flew to Los Angeles for the event. 'I hope people now see that this isn't just Ghana's problem. Fast fashion is a global health hazard that affects all of us before it even reaches Kantamanto. No one is isolated from it.' Money remains tight for The Or Foundation, which has distributed $1.5 million in emergency relief to the nearly 10,000 vendors who saw their livelihoods burned to ashes at the start of the new year. But it's still struggling to raise cash to rebuild Kantamanto with essential fire safety measures while continuing to fund programs involving textile waste diversion, skills training and financial education, beach monitoring and cleanups and chiropractic services for the female head porters known as kayayei. So far, only Vestiaire Collective, Debrand, Puma and eBay along with a collective of Belgian brands that include Bel & Bo, Claes Retail Group, e5 Fashion, Noterman Fashion, Pluto, Torfs and Xandre, have contributed, in stark contrast to the outpouring of generosity—many times over the $5 million Ricketts estimates will resurrect the marketplace—from the likes of Nike, Gap Inc., the Walt Disney Co. and Target for restoring burned-out neighborhoods in the Altadena, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena areas. That's where Suay hopes to come in. Sponsoring a 20-pound bag for its 'Suay It Forward' textile-recycling platform costs $20; 100,000 of these bags would help it raise $2 million, split evenly between Suay and The Or Foundation to wrestle with the problem of textile overflow on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The two organizations will also be collaborating to create a 'Textiles aren't Trash' capsule collection, pieced together from the donation surplus that Suay has absorbed, as well as conducting clothing 'sort-a-thons,' where they'll invite members of the community to tally which brands are showing up most often in Los Angeles' clothing waste, similar to the 'Tag Ur It' audits that The Or Foundation has been conducting in Ghana. 'It's important for organizations like Suay in L.A. to show solidarity with Kantamanto because the two communities may be thousands of miles apart geographically but the systemic monster that is overproduction and overconsumption we fight against knows no bounds,' said Sammy Oteng, senior community engagement manager at The Or Foundation. 'This is why Suay has hundreds of thousands of pounds of clothes nobody wants sitting in storage, and on the other hand, the Kantamanto community continue to fall deeper in debt working to recirculate the global North's excess while Accra beaches are being taken over by clothing tentacles.' For Medoff, watching Los Angeles relate to clothing in the wake of the fires has been an education in and of itself. 'It was interesting to see the conversation continue to develop from, 'We need a bunch of textiles' to 'These textiles aren't right; there's too much' or 'They're not good enough,'' she said. 'And this is the conversation that is happening daily in Ghana and other places where they're getting bombarded by textile waste.' For months, Suay's phone was ringing off its hook. There's an intrinsic impulse for people to empty their closets when disaster strikes, even though it might be more prudent—and expedient, human labor-wise—to fork out cash. 'People were calling us with, like, semi-trucks: 'I'm coming from Texas, I'm coming from Reno, I have a truck full of clothes to drop off,'' Medoff said. 'And so you see humanity like rising to the occasion and feeling overwhelmed by wanting to help, but also we have no organized disaster relief when it comes to clothing. And it is a disaster, in terms of clothing and textile waste, which is what Liz and her team deals with on a daily basis.' With the passing of California's extended producer responsibility bill for textiles, there's a shot at doing things differently, Ricketts said. But that will also depend on whether the Golden State follows the French model of 'essentially subsidizing sorting for export' or if it's going to build the infrastructure necessary to ensure that organizations like Suay have the support to recirculate textiles locally. 'So hopefully this partnership then provides a model, a case study, that we can speak to to say, 'This is why money should be going to repair,'' she said. 'Money should be going to upcycling. Money should be going to taking clothing that we know has very low value and turning it into something of higher value. Otherwise, it's always going to be a mass amount of low-value products and the only outlet is going to be to export it. You can't just be putting money into sorting; you have to be putting money into added-value services here in California and elsewhere. And it's not going to happen overnight.'
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Fast fashion is haunting L.A.'s wildfire relief efforts
The Sunday after the wildfires hit L.A. County, volunteers sorted through piles of clothing outside of L.A. Climate Week's host, the nonprofit Collidescope Foundation. Even as they packed dozens of 13-gallon trash bags with items sorted by gender, age, and type, mountains of more donations were stacked floor to ceiling inside. In a crisis, Los Angeles residents like Halle Berry packed up their dresses, sweaters, jeans, jackets, and more for wildfire victims. It's a heartwarming gesture, but donation hubs ended up with more used clothing than they could realistically pass on to wildfire survivors. Furthermore, some of the clothing people donated was dirty, worn, or unusable, Next City reports. "The clothing donations that we have received have been a little overwhelming for us, especially with our capacity here in this space," says Olivia Peay, volunteer coordinator for Collidescope's impromptu donation center (donations were moved to a space donated by co-working space Intersections LA). "It's been difficult to try to find more distribution centers that are willing to accept these clothes." Now, sustainability initiatives and textile recyclers like Black Pearl, Suay Sew Shop, and Trashie have stepped up to handle the excess, drawing attention to the ongoing role that fast fashion is playing in the climate crisis. Mutual aid groups and everyday citizens leaped into action after the Palisades and Eaton fires forced over 100,000 people to evacuate their homes, setting up donation hubs to distribute food, masks, clothing, and hygiene products. They asked people to donate—and Angelenos did. Volunteers have been left to sort through the abundance and beg on social media: Stop donating your trash. In a natural disaster, people are just trying to help, explains Samata Pattinson, founder and CEO of Black Pearl, a cultural sustainability company. "And it's lovely, but it's also a moment for reflection of, well, why do we have so much and why is so much of it stuff we'd forgotten about?" she says. "So there's a way to reassess our relationship with what we now consume." Black Pearl is working to make sure that all clothing donations at the Collidescope donation center are thoughtfully distributed and reused. Their first priority: Getting items to families in need, especially new items donated by local clothing brands. When clothing manufacturers make too much, those items are typically thrown away or sold at a deep discount; Black Pearl is working to instead take that excess and match it to wildfire survivors. Used items that are left can go to homeless shelters, pet shelters, art and design colleges for students who need textiles, and theater groups that need costumes. Other companies have stepped up to handle the massive scale of clothing donations. Suay Sew Shop, an L.A.-based recycled fashion brand and retailer, has collected 50,000 pounds of clothing from overwhelmed donation sites, storing them for future upcycling. On Jan. 17, about 100 volunteers helped the mail-in recycling startup Trashie load up a truck with 23,000 pounds of clothing from the Santa Anita Park pop-up donation center. Last week, the company collected an additional 50,000 pounds of clothing to send to its Texas-based recycling center. "This is what happens during a natural disaster— there's excess clothing donations," says Annie Gullingsrud, Trashie's chief strategy officer. "They're mishandled, right? They're put into some storage or they're set somewhere. They get moldy; they end up in landfill." Trashie normally handles 80,000 pounds of clothing on a weekly basis through its clothing recycling program, so the company was ready to step in. Customers across the U.S. can purchase a Take Back Bag to mail in used clothing and receive credit towards rewards. Gullingsrud says that about 70% of a Trashie bag's contents get reused and about 20-25% is recycled. She estimates that about 60% of the clothing collected at Santa Anita Park is reusable. "What we recommend is, donate what you would wear," she says. Could this be a teaching moment for Americans who consume too much fast fashion? "You can buy a dress for $2, so we have this influx of poorer quality disposable fashion," says Pattinson of Black Pearl. "People don't feel like they have to hold on to it for so long, because, you know, next week, I can get something new. So we're kind of creating this perfect storm of excess." And it's not just on the consumer side—clothing producers are making too much, with 85% of discarded textiles ending up in landfills and incinerators. When you donate clothing to a thrift store, only about 20% of it is sold in-store. The rest is recycled, thrown away, or sent overseas to be sorted and resold. This creates a "waste issue" for countries like Chile and Ghana, says Pattinson. People assume that their used clothing is going to help people, but that's not the case. "I'm a British-born Ghanaian, so I know this really well. Like, 'Oh, we're just helping the poor kids in Africa that don't have clothes,'" she adds. "They have their own designers. They can make clothes … they want their local economies to grow, not just based on our waste." In a disaster situation, donating clothing can create more work for already overwhelmed relief centers. "We're always educating people about the fact that things don't just disappear," says Gullingsrud. Once excess clothing donations are sent to Trashie's recycling center, they go through a multiple-step grading and sorting process. Some items that are not needed will be sold, some will be recycled and some will be stored so that L.A.-based organizations can request specific items in the future. Pattinson hopes that people can rethink their relationship to clothing—as a means of storytelling and self-expression, not just over-consumption. "It's about buying, it's about mending, it's about customizing, it's about getting pre-loved. I think our wardrobe should be a curation of all of those things, not just all new things that we buy and wear once and forget about," she says. "They should be a collection of stories." This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. This story was produced by Next City, a nonprofit newsroom covering solutions for equitable cities, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Overwhelming': what happens to 50,000lb of extra LA wildfire clothing donations?
At Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles's arts district, mounds of clothes are piled high in a warehouse. The T-shirts, socks, jackets and denim are surplus donations from the LA wildfires that community groups across the city were unable to distribute because they had too much already, or because the items were dirty, damaged or poorly made. Instead of letting the clothes go to a landfill, where they can cause a host of environmental problems, Suay has rescued 50,000lbs of textiles so they can be cleaned, sorted and upcycled by professional designers and sewers. Since LA currently has no permanent textile recycling or collection, it's up to groups like Suay to save as many textiles as possible before they get dumped or exported. 'To see the overwhelming influx of textiles donations here in Los Angeles in response to the devastating wildfires just shows how the current systems in place have failed us all,' said Suay's co-founder and CEO Lindsay Rose Medoff. 'We have to draw the connections to our everyday consumption and disposal habits. Until we draw these connections, the same overproduction that is impacting our climate and resulting in these disasters will continue to strengthen.' Experts say a surge in donations can actually impede relief efforts since volunteers have to handle sudden influxes of clothing when they are unwearable or unwanted. Without a climate-informed approach, well-intentioned donations are likely to end up in landfills or polluting deserts and beaches in other parts of the world. A leading industrial polluter, the fashion industry is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions, and the rise of 'fast fashion', cheap garments that are only worn a few times, is a major contributor to our environmental crisis. Suay expects to take on additional donations in the coming weeks as other centers in the Los Angeles area continue shutting down, and say they will find a way to upcycle them into the fire aid relief support they were meant for. Suay was among the first to mobilize, creating a free store for LA fire victims that features stylish clothing and textiles that allow people to replace lost items with dignity. It's open daily and located upstairs from their retail shop, which sells Suay's upcycled fashion and home goods, from mini mesh tote bags made from old sports jerseys to oven mitts remade from flannel and denim, and one-of-a-kind dresses fashioned from vintage T-shirts. They are asking people to support fire victims by sponsoring a $20 Suay It Forward bag of clothes to be sorted, donated and upcycled into free materials for fire victims and other members of the community in need. Since 2017, Suay has taken in enormous volumes of clothing and upcycled unused textiles into remade apparel and home goods, diverting more than 4m lbs of textiles from landfills in the process. Their 'zero-landfill, zero-export system' means excess donations are handled responsibly. 'One of the biggest impacts stemming from excess donations is the reappearance of these textiles in developing countries,' said Jessica Kosak, who teaches courses on sustainable systems in fashion at ASU FIDM. 'They don't necessarily have the waste infrastructure we have here in the US, and they can't effectively dispose of these materials, so the result is things end up in waterways, on beaches and in our oceans and that contributes to pollution overall.' A disturbing 85% of all textiles end up in landfills where they emit methane gas and leach chemicals and dyes into our soil and groundwater. Only about 15% of clothing and other textiles gets reused, even though an estimated 95% of the materials such as fabrics, yarns, fibers and buttons are recyclable. In 2021, approximately 1.2m tonnes of textiles were thrown out in California alone. Last year, the state passed a first-in-the-country textile recycling bill that puts the onus on brands to implement and fund a statewide reuse, repair and recycling program for their products, but it won't be operational until 2028. 'I think disasters like these bring out the best and the worst of our systems, which are really not designed for this volume of any particular product,' said Dr Joanne Brasch, director of advocacy for the non-profit California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC), who co-sponsored the state's Responsible Textile Recovery Act. But there are things the state can do, sustainability advocates say: host clothing swap opportunities and provide public workshops on how to properly clean and mend clothes so people can learn about maintaining the value of our apparel. Rather than donating more clothes for fire victims, experts say to consider selling wearable pieces on platforms such as Depop, Poshmark, ThredUp or eBay and give the proceeds to fire victims. Peer-to-peer reselling apps help ensure the item retains its value because a seller is more likely to clean the piece or make any needed repairs and give it the best chance possible to be resold. Related: Clothes, toiletries – and a free stylist: the LA teen creating a space for peers amid the fires 'You're attaching value even if you're selling a fast fashion item for $10,' said ASU FIDM's Kosak. 'When someone purchases something off one of those platforms, they're going to value it more because they had to go searching for it.' Not everyone has time to sell clothing via an app or digital platform, but taking that mindset of cleaning and repairing any items and treating textiles in a way that you want to receive them goes a long way in ensuring our clothes can go on. Most of the people who donated apparel for fire victims likely did so with good intentions for their clothing to be reused, while others use disaster as a chance to offload items they didn't want anymore. But Suay, which has built a digital community of more than 500,000 people on Instagram, and other like-minded activists, are helping more people wake up to the serious impacts of overproduction, overconsumption and lack of infrastructure to handle textile waste responsibly. 'This is a pivotal moment in understanding the volume, our broken waste management for this product and understanding that no one wants a lot of the stuff in your closet,' said CPSC's Brasch. 'One of the easier things individuals can do to relieve the burden of someone else having to do it.'
