As someone obsessed with sustainable fashion and ‘greening’ my wardrobe, I was excited to see the latest innovative recirculation partnership between ethical, independent designer Lucy & Yak and iconic vintage clothing retailer Beyond Retro. Dubbed The Re:Yak Partnership – the initiative aims to tackle the growing environmental impact of the fashion industry by giving clothes a significantly longer life and stopping them from ending up in landfills.

It all centers around a kind of swap element – which as someone who has organised many clothes swaps in my time, I LOVE! Basically, eco-conscious fashionistas can take their pre-loved Lucy & Yak items to a Beyond Retro store in London – which are located in Brick Lane, Dalston and Oxford Circus – and in return they will be given a voucher to spend at Lucy & Yak online or in-store. The value of the voucher will depend on what the returned item is and the condition that it is in. As an added bonus, if Beyond Retro sells any of the items donated, they will give a Beyond Retro credit voucher to the original owner who donated the item.

Not all items will be resold though. Some will be recycled through the non-profit campaign Love Not Landfill, which gives old clothes a longer life and aims to stop clothes from being thrown in the bin and ending up in landfills. Old clothes going to landfills is one of the major issues surrounding fast fashion and a large contributor to fashions sustainability problems.

In fact, a total of 745 million kgs of fabric is wasted each year in the UK alone. And with a population of 67 million, that makes the nation one of the most wasteful in Europe. To break it down for you, in the UK, we discard the same amount of fabric as the weight of the London Eye every single day. And the average European wastes around 11kg of fabric per year. The Re:Yak initiative aims to reduce these figures, empowering people to refresh their wardrobe with sustainability in mind, by offering their pre-loved clothes to a new home or having them recycled into something completely new.

For more info. visit: https://lucyandyak.com/pages/reyak-partners

Written by Lupe Castro

Photography courtesey of Lucy & Yak