Year 4 Upcycling Fashionistas!!

During Term 3, 4H and 4M have been learning about Sustainability through our ‘Being Green’ unit of work. One of the things we discovered was that Australia is the second biggest consumer of fabric per person in the world. Each of us buys an average of 27 kilos of new clothing and other textiles every year!

Well you might not realise it, but throwing out all of these unwanted clothes can actually have a huge impact on the environment! Back in the old days, most people only had a few different outfits and if they fell apart they’d sew them back up again and again. But a lot’s changed since then!

The fashion industry encourages us to keep buying by making sure everyone can have the latest trend quickly and cheaply. Some ends up in recycled clothing stores, but 85 percent ends up here in landfill. And clothing made from polyester for example can take up to 200 years to break down!

This made us think about ways we could help reduce the amount of clothing waste we produced and how we could recycle unwanted items of clothing.

We bought in our unwanted items of clothing to share with each other and then thought of ways we could ‘upcycle’ these items to make something new. We have had lots of fun designing and creating our fashions and look forward to showing them off in our video!

Fashion Parade 2 from Belinda Leeson on Vimeo.