TRAID's story
For 23 years TRAID has been the only UK charity dedicated to addressing the negative impacts of the fashion industry. Over-consumption is having a seriously negative environmental impact, while exploitative labour and unsafe working conditions are all too common in fast fashion supply chains.
TRAID focuses on encouraging us to reuse second-hand clothes; tackling the negative social and environmental impacts of producing, consuming and wasting clothes. The charity provides people with reuse services to stop wearable clothes being thrown away; and putting wearable clothes back into use in their charity shops around London.
Education programmes and campaigns run by TRAID raise further awareness of the negative socio-environmental impacts of clothes and aim to persuade and inspire people, businesses and policy makers to take action to keep clothes in use for longer. These campaigns include wearing more second-hand rather than new, passing on unworn clothes for someone else to use, buying less and/or better quality, caring for and repairing clothes.
TRAID also helps with funding and support for global projects to establish more sustainable production and safer fairer conditions for people working in the supply chains making clothes abroad that are purchased in the UK – from supporting organic cotton production to stopping child and bonded labour.
Useful learnings from TRAID
Textile waste is a complex problem. However, making better use of existing garments and putting unworn clothes back into use is something simple that individuals can do and that communities can get behind.
Educating people on how to improve their usage of a garment improves its durability and prolongs its useful life, with the added benefit of lowering its overall carbon footprint.
Sustainable fashion teaches us how to love our clothes again, recognising that there is a story and lifecycle behind each finished piece of clothing. In this way, buying decisions can be reframed in a positive light and not as an inconsequential part of a modern lifestyle that changes with every season.
TRAID's metrics
- Extend the life cycle of wearable clothes
- Reduce consumption of new clothes
- Source clothes in more socially beneficial ways
- Reduce the overuse of increasingly scarce natural resources
- Reduce waste and carbon emissions
