In a waste reprocessing plant The first clothes exchange party in Bonn
Bonn · Successful opening night at an unusual location: The first clothes exchange party at the Bonn waste recycling plant was not easy to find, but was well stocked.
On average, every person in Germany buys about 60 items of clothing per year and every fifth purchase is not even worn. In Germany, 1.5 billion items of clothing are thrown away every year. "Is fast fashion not an option for you?" asked the SWB Verwertung company, inviting people to their first clothing exchange party on Wednesday evening at the waste recycling plant (MVA) on Am Dickobskreuz.
Anyone who managed to find the entrance to the administration building in the dark and after negotiating the crossing at the red traffic lights on the company premises, found themselves in a tidy hall, in which the items of clothing handed in by Bonn Transport Authority (SWB) employees were laid out on tables, sorted by size, and everyone could try on a new wardrobe to their hearts' content. The idea is not new: swap parties in Bonn exist and have been initiated in the past by various environmental initiatives and commercial suppliers. However, during the current Waste Avoidance Week, the Bonn Transport Authority was able to find the discarded garments a better home in an unusual environment.
"More and more people in Bonn are committed to sustainability," said Saskia Kutsche from the SWB, who then provided some impressive figures to show that the thermal recycling of about 260,000 tonnes of household waste, which accumulates in the waste recycling plant every year, could save approximately 50,000 tonnes of CO2, since energy recovery could supply 19,000 households with electricity and 10,000 apartments with district heating.
"Because of child labour in Bangladesh, and that clothes have to be sent all over the world", are only two of many arguments for why Winfried Wershofen came to exchange clothes. "We live in a schizoid society with increasingly more hype than substance", the therapist complained, "as if we had no other problems than to follow the whole trendy bandwagon."
It is the first time that the two 27-year-old friends Viktoria Pinsdorf and Laura Lütz have come to a clothing exchange in Bonn. Lütz knew the idea from Berlin, where it was accompanied by various beauty offers such as a “girls’ day” in a big hotel. Pinsdorf reveals the origin of her clothes by admitting that “we often go to flea markets, where we exchange clothes with our friends,” For both, sustainability is the driving force; “moreover, new clothes always smell so horrible," says Lütz.
For Bianca Ludwig (22) from Kessenich, swapping and wearing used clothes is a matter of course. She takes a critical view of the sale of second-hand clothes because it provides the money to buy new clothes. "When 'vintage' becomes fashion", she says, "the sense of sustainability is no longer recognisable".
(Original text; Stefan Hermes, translation John Chandler)
