Butterflies
Recycle Your Bra
(Can’t think of a pun for the subtittle).
Recognising the fate of the world is in our hands, we’re in the business of buying less, reusing more and recycling often. We spend every waking minute giving our unwanted books, CDs, toys, games, films, furniture and clothes to charity shops so people can buy our cast offs second hand. It reduces the colossal amount of waste we inflict on the world, we think. It helps poor people and rich hipsters, we think. It gives school bullies something to focus on, we think. We’re right. And we’re great. But we can max out our rightness and our greatness by recycling our bras.
In the UK, Smalls For All collects your unwanted bras and other unwanted underoos, and ships them out to women and girls across Africa and the UK. Your bras could reach people living in orphanages, slums, displaced persons’ camps, schools and hospitals in Ethiopia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and such and such. Or they could go to charities in the UK fighting to undo the effects of poverty, helping people who can’t afford a decent bra. Similarly, Against Breast Cancer runs bra banks for knackered bras, working with recyclers on their textile recovery project to keep your bras out of landfill and shipping them off to countries where new bras are so expensive women and girls have to settle for gravity and crippling back pain. If they receive bras too far gone to be worn they’ll reuse or recycle them; I for one have a lovely beanbag made from one of Bella Emberg’s left cups. In the US you can donate your bras to Free the Girls and Bra Recycling who will do much the same. Elsewhere in the world you have access to many a search engine and shouldn’t rely on me to do all the work all the time. I’m teaching you to fish, damn it.
This is all good stuff but you might be wondering why we’re singling out bras instead of just bunging them down the chazza with our second Rubik’s Cubes and DaVinci Codes. It’s the patriarchy, stupid. If your bra’s in a charity shop it might go to someone short of money or inspire a short story for Bagpuss – which would be good – but giving to one of these projects might help women and girls in countries where their basic needs are ignored, or where meeting them costs more than they can manage. This is a good thing to do.
Go do it.
Recycle your bra
Help women who need them
You'll make their lives better
Photo credit: Alvimann at MorgueFile
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