Clothes Swap
Mural Painting
Pizza making
Pizza at Point YPT
Rag wreath making
Upcycled planter
Mural Painting
A little of the mural
Pizza chefs at Point YPT
Rag upcycling
An upcycling session with volunteers
Pembrokeshire Remakery upcycled furniture session
Update: This project was funded until June 2020 and regular activities are not currently taking place.
Our Waste busting Activities Project has been up and running since June 2019. Funded by Pembrokeshire County Council’s Enhancing Pembrokeshire Fund the project has attracted a group of keen volunteers who meet every Thursday at Gateway Hub to develop their waste busting skills. The group facilitated monthly Funky Fashion Fix Clothes Swaps and Repair Sessions throughout the first 6 months. However it was soon apparent that due to the fast fashion industry, the clothes swaps generated a supply of more clothes that people off loaded, than those that were taken away! This got our volunteers thinking about ways to up-cycle the clothes back into circulation. Over the weeks we have held workshops trialing different ways of re-fabricating old clothes into new fabric to make new garments. During our Thursday Get Crafty with Fabric sessions we have been sharing old skills and learning and developing new ones. It has been a whole lot of fun, saved us spending money on new clothes and it’s very sociable and always involves a good natter and a cup of tea or two!
For the future of our planet’s sake we can’t carry on producing, consuming and discarding clothing at the rate we currently do! It’s estimated that in the UK the average person buys 26.7kg of new clothes per year yet in many other European countries like Germany, France and Holland they consume almost half of this! Fast Fashion is now being hailed as the New Single Use Plastic! Wearing polyester clothes is like wearing fossil fuels! Since 2000 the amount of polyester in our new clothes has risen by 60%. The World’s Fashion Industry produces more CO2 emissions than flying! If it were a country its emissions would rank almost as highly as the entire European continent. Cotton production is not much better as it requires a lot of land and water to produce cotton and its production often leads to fertilizers and pesticide pollution.
What is needed now in the face of the Climate Crisis is a shift in our personal consumption and buying habits especially with clothes. Over the coming months our Waste Busting Craft Hub will see us transforming the old clothes we are re-fabricating into new garments and items. Come and see how we do it at our free drop in sessions. We also have regular pop up Wax Food Wrap Making Workshops so you can learn to ditch the cling film, Clothes Swaps and Clothes Repair Pop Ups so your old clothes can be loved and cherished and given a new home or new lease of life.
Community Feasts In Autumn 2019 in partnership with Point Youth Centre our volunteers made pizzas from food waste saved by Fishguard and Goodwick Community Fridge. The outdoor woodfired pizzas were cooked by Celtic Crust Pizzas at a Pop Up Pizza Party to thank our volunteers and the Community Fridge volunteers for all the hard work they do, hosted by the young people at Point. We are looking to provide many more cooking and catering opportunities using surplus food. Please get in touch if you have any ideas or would like to get involved.
Community Engagement/Young People’s Mural Project Our Waste Busting Project Coordinator Becky has been busy networking at events over the summer along with volunteers. World Ocean Day, June 8th 2019 saw the team engaging with the public to raise awareness about the Project. Through this work links were made with local schools and the team attended Gwaunfest at Ysgol Bro Gwaun to promote the project some more. It became apparent that young people are very anxious about the Climate Crisis which has been highlighted by Greta Thunberg and The School Strikes for Climate. An engagement project developed called Climate Emergency! #what can I do? To give young people a voice and highlight positive things like our waste busting activities that we can all do. Attracting interest from Point Youth Project, Ysgol Wdig and Ysgol Glannau Gwaun, children and young people were invited to come up with designs for a mural. Two painting workshops were held with 20 young people who helped local artist Lloyd the Graffiti to paint the fantastic mural in the lane approaching The Gateway Hub. The mural shouts out a very positive message helping to open up the climate conversation in a positive way. It also brightens up the area making it more attractive and appealing to users of Gateway. Funding for the mural came from Renew Cymru with support also from Fishguard and District Round Table.
Thank you to Pembrokeshire County Council for funding this project