Burwell Swish

Published: 10 April 2025

Thank you so much if you came to our Swish last Sunday. It was a great success and lots of fun. We had over 100 people through the door, and rehomed 204kg of clothing and accessories! We also received over £400 from generous donations and from selling hot drinks and cake in the cafe. This will be added to our eco grant money.

There are a few reasons we organise these events. The first is the real environmental benefits of reusing clothes rather than buying new. Manufacturing clothes uses a lot of natural resources and creates greenhouse gas emissions. It’s very hard to estimate how much carbon is saved by reusing rather than buying new but some studies suggest it may be about 25kg of carbon per kg of clothes - so our Swish may have saved 5100kg of carbon (this is equal to driving a petrol car 22,651 miles).

Another big reason for doing it is to save people money, and get unused clothes out there being used by someone else.

And of course it’s a great community event - the volunteers enjoyed themselves sorting and weighing clothes, baking and moving a lot of tables about, and the visitors seemed to be having a lovely time browsing the rails and having a cuppa and a slice of cake. A super way to bring local people together.

We’ll be doing another one in the Autumn - see you there.