Love Your Clothes

The WRAP ‘Love Your Clothes’ campaign aims to raise awareness of the value of clothes and encourage people to make the most of the clothes they already have. The campaign has been developed as part of the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan. The campaign aims to encourage sustainable consumption of clothing, including through its interactive website which is aimed at householders/ consumers and providing them with easy and practical tips to: • make their clothes last longer; • reduce the environmental impact of laundering their clothes; • deal with unwanted clothes; and • make the most of their wardrobe. Love Your Clothes also provides free material e.g. posters and images for local UK authorities to use to promote its campaign moments and overall aims of the campaign. Its overall objective is to encourage UK citizens to reduce the environmental impact of clothing by buying clothes thoughtfully, caring for and repairing clothes in ways that make them last longer, trying refashioning and upcycling of clothing, and dealing with unwanted clothes in a responsible way by selling, swapping, donating or recycling. Recent consumer campaign moments as part of Love Your Clothes include The Big Closet Clear Out and Dirty Laundry Doodles. The Big Closet Clear out was an initiative launched this March, which will now run annually, to encourage consumers to keep clothes out of the bin and create wardrobe space – not waste. The dedicated page of the LYC website gives tips for selling (including links directly to resale websites), swapping, donating and recycling (with a link to a recycling locator). It also suggests staging your own Big Closet Clear Out event, with friends or work colleagues. The Dirty Laundry Doodles campaign used the common laundry dilemmas of white shirts accidentally dyed pink and the shrunken t-shirt moment to encourage us all to dial it down and wash at 30°C. This small action makes a big difference – ensuring your clothes last longer as well as saving energy and reducing the carbon footprint of washing clothes. Posting illustrations looking at this issue by a range of artists who collaborated with WRAP, along with information about all of the benefits of washing at 30°C, including cost benefits means consumers have been given lots of reasons to make this change! The Love Your Clothes movement exists to reduce the impact of clothes on the environment. When it began in 2014, an estimated 300,000 tonnes of clothing were thrown away each year in the UK. It has also been found that changes to the way the UK supplies, uses and disposes of clothing could reduce the carbon, water and waste footprints of clothing consumption by 10-20% each.- this shows there is a clear reason for change! Love Your Clothes aims to help consumers make small conscious changes to reduce the impact clothing has, improving its sustainability throughout its lifecycle, particularly by lengthening the active life of the clothes we wear. By increasing the lifecycle of clothes, less will be ending up in landfill, and care tips such as the Dirty Laundry Doodles that encourage consumers to wash clothes at lower temperatures, means lower energy use in clothes maintenance, another way of lessening the impact our clothing has on our planet. To find out more information, visit the Love Your Clothes website, which is full of advice for buying, caring for, upcycling and donating your clothing- https://www.loveyourclothes.org.uk/ You can also go to this link- http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/love-your-clothes-waste-prevention on the WRAP website to find out more about the project and WRAP's wider clothing work.