Nothing Through Sustainability
Martha
What are the environmental impacts of nothing? Everything humans do leaves a mark on this world. The sustainability aspect of our campaign focuses on how individual underconsumption can leave lasting positive impacts on our environmental footprint. Collective action is important, and through our campaign we hope to incentivise people to get on board with our mission.
The first aspect of our approach is the trend mitigation. Overconsumption is a large contributor to humans’ environmental impact. On average, Americans discard over 81 pounds of clothing each per year, contributing to over 13 million pounds of clothing ending up in the landfill. This waste is unacceptable. As our landfills get fuller, there is no end to fast fashion churning out more and more designs so that consumers become convinced they must buy new items to stay on trend. With the first implementation of our marketing strategy we hope to get across to our clients that the clothes they have already are good. We want to demonstrate that being on trend is less important than their environmental impact. This will start with an article on our website about the environmental impacts of clothing waste.
The next stage of our process is buying less. This is rooted in both a promotion of the positive financial impact that buying less has and also in the positive environmental footprint. We plan to promote individual underconsumption through articles on our website. Additionally flyers around campus will say “buy nothing” to remind people of their commitment to Nothing November.
The third step of our sustainability campaign of nothing is promoting repair of personal items. This will be the easiest to implement because it is an actionable item that interested persons can participate in. We will promote spaces like the idea forge on campus that have sewing machines, irons, and pins. We will put out flyers for a basic sewing event where participants can learn the basics of darning, and patching. Because this will be through the school it will be free which also fits in with our idea of spending less. Additionally we will promote businesses such as Boulder Sports Recycler, Rock & Resole, and Vacuums R Us & Sewing Too. These are all local businesses that we want to support and promote because they take in used goods and fix them. We will promote the repair of items both through flyers and our website.
Lastly, we plan to run a massive clothing swap in conjunction with the Environmental Center. We all have clothes that just don’t work for us or don’t fit anymore and would be better suited for others instead of repaired for ourselves. This will be promoted through flyers around campus as well as in a campus-wide email. It will be a way to promote reinvestment into what we already have and new love for old objects.