After hosting their second waste wise clothing swap this week the Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society is eying a Repair Cafe.
Communications coordinator, Brianna van de Wijngaard says the event is one that has been done in other parts of Canada and the world.
“It’s a similar idea in that you get a number of volunteers scheduled who have different skills in repairing things whether it’s electrical or carpentry or seamstresses, and then people can bring items that they have that are busted because they don’t know how to fix and they work on fixing them.”
van de Wijngaard said while it is not for certain, they are hoping to be able to hold the Repair Cafe within the next few months.
Roughly 90 people attended CCCS’s Waste Wise clothing swap with 20 to 25 garbage bags of the remaining clothing being delivered to the Women’s Contact Society, Pregnancy Outreach, St. Vincent De Paul Society, and the Salvation Army.
“We didn’t advertise the first one in 2015 as much but this one we did decide to advertise more and we definitely noticed a difference,” van de Wijngaard said.
“There was more interest even just outside of the conservation crowd too which is really great. We always want to reach out to other groups in the community when we can.”
Because the textile industry is globalized mostly overseas, Van said many of us are not aware of its environmental impacts.
“We don’t see it a lot in our background but of course we are the ones that typically spend the most money on it,” she said.
“I’d say it’s definitely sort of an underdog when it comes to environmental culprits so that’s definitely the main reason we wanted to do this event as just sort of a fun way to remind people or expose people to their impacts on something that can go relatively unnoticed.”