ReWear – The Trouble with Textiles


Re-think Representing Your Event With T-shirts

The average citizen throws away 70 pounds of clothing and other textiles annually, occupying nearly 5% of landfill space and untold acres of our desert landscape when dumped in the environment.

526384_365054053598508_850144298_nBe aware,  unwanted garments can easily be donated to area charities at storefronts, donation centers and collection boxes and purchased secondhand for next to nothing and by bulk weight.

While DEHSART has re-purposed t-shirts into collection bags for our community clean-up stations, we’ve also seen some great examples of using thrifted shirts to promote events, giving new life to unwanted items while helping to lessen our textile consumption.

Read on for some tales of t-shirt recycling:

 

 

Artist Melissa Jacobs Gray created an art event at the University of Oklahoma called Fast Free Internet. She gathered a collection of garments from thrift stores and invited participants to capture a selfie in the Lightwell Gallery where the image was printed and almost instantly transferred onto a second hand t-shirt of their choosing. The installation considered our expectation of rapid sharing of self-representation up against the idea of fast fashion and textile waste. Most participants put on the completed shirts and posed for yet another selfie and a new system of fast free fashion customized via the internet recycled on.

Each rock climbing season, Flophouse Resoles creates a custom t-shirt to giveaway to fellow climbers at educational events. Like Gray, owner Dave Berumen selects shirts from a thrift clearance center where he can purchase garments cheaply or even by the pound. These shirts are washed and screen printed with the featured, limited edition graphic.

 

IMG_1916

If you are sponsoring community events, consider reflecting your concern for our environment while raising awareness about your cause by creating custom tees from secondhand shirts.

 

(stat source: http://www.weardonaterecycle.org/)