Page 1749 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 June 2022
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This initiative grew directly out of her research at the university. Monica’s PhD focuses on clothing and textile sustainability. She says:
We simply can’t keep pulling things out of the earth and putting them back into landfill.
There is about a kilogram of cotton in a typical pair of jeans and a T-shirt, but, as Monica points out, there are a lot of other things embedded in that kilo of cotton, including 66 kilowatt hours of energy and somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 litres of water.
Monica’s advice is simple:
… all the research shows that the best way you can be more sustainable is to wear an item as many times as possible before you discard it.
This quest for longevity depends upon maintenance, she notes, which includes both proper laundering and repairs. This is where community initiatives like Repair Cafes come in. Monica’s research has identified two major changes in Australian society. The first is that sometime in the 1990s Australian schools stopped routinely teaching manual skills. “There was this idea”, she has said, “that we needed knowledge workers, not manual workers.” As a result, many people no longer know how to mend their own clothing.
At the UC and Ginninderry Repair Cafes, however, Monica teaches people how to sew on buttons, fix rips, mend fallen hems and so forth. Most of these repairs are not difficult. She says:
I get a lot of repairs … that take five minutes or less.
And this is an important fact, because the other major change that has occurred is access to cheap clothing. As a result, many people think, “Why bother repairing something now when I can go and buy a new one?” But this is a false economy. As Monica makes clear, it often takes longer to go out and buy something than it would to do a quick repair.
Of course, another way to make sure that clothing is worn as many times as possible is to pass it along when we no longer need it. Many of us know that this can be done through community op shops. I take this opportunity to mention Roundabout Canberra. Local resident Hannah Andrevski founded this enterprise as a means of getting preloved clothing for babies and children into the hands of local charities that support families in need.
Roundabout Canberra recently ran out of clothing for older children. I understand that a generous community response has filled the gap when it comes to clothing for girls, but Hannah and her team are still desperate for boys’ clothing in sizes 8 through to 16. I take this opportunity to encourage any Canberrans who have clean, good condition boys’ clothing in these sizes to consider dropping it off to Roundabout Canberra, located at the Holt Community Hub in Beaurepaire Crescent, between 10 am and 1 pm on weekdays or between 1 pm and 4 pm on Saturdays.
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