Swaps allow you to see the impact happening right in front of you. People happy to get unwanted crap out of their lives and others delighted to pour through racks of free clothing and costumes. It’s theatre waste reduction in action!
My goal is to transform unwanted costumes, clothing, and materials into community good. I deeply believe that every unwanted item has a home where it is useful. So much of our “trash” holds potential, it’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Here’s the impact from this year’s swap:
3,872 pounds of textiles collected.
3,620 of that went home with participants (estimated), this includes:
3 boxes of winter clothes and warm basics to Care for Friends
1 box of kids costumes to Give and Receive for their Bootique
3 boxes of blankets and towels to an animal shelter
80 lbs to Conscious Costume to become rental costumes for theatre productions
What we did with the rest:
When I’m rehoming things, I consider where they could do the most good for the community. After a big event like this, I prioritize charities who provide free clothing and ideally take lots of different categories of clothing. This is why we’ve started working with Cradles to Crayons, they take lots of types of clothing, can accommodate large donations, and they have a textile recycler for anything they cannot use. This ensures as close to a zero waste clothing swap as possible!
Of the 252 pounds that remained, here’s where it went:
4 Bags of trash: (single shoes, broken plastic pieces, sticky stained costumes, unsanitary items)
Lots of Boxes: posted on Box Dibs (a local box sharing group in Chicago)
1 box of Fabric yardage: WasteShed (Kimball location)
Lots of usable clothing: A community co-op located near Timeline’s storage facility OR Cradles to Crayons
Textile recycling: Cradles to Crayons
All other materials went back to Conscious Costume where they will be sorted further
Unwearable socks recycled through GoldToe’s Terracycle program
Unwearable sneakers recycled through Got Sneakers
Damaged straw hats will be composted (can you help us with this?)
Other items will go into our Free Store to help with sustainable theatre practices
Halloween costumes will be stored until the next swap
Environmental Impact:
Pounds of CO2 avoided: 7,976.32
Gallons of water saved: 9,298,608
Methodology
We weigh everything on a hanging scale as it comes in, this may or may not include packaging and we round to the nearest half pound for each weight.
As attendees leave, we estimate the weight of how much they took based on average bag weights provided by Savers and educated guesses.
How we calculated emissions avoided: 2.06 pounds CO2 per pound of textiles as estimated in FabScrap’s 2025 annual report
How we calculated water saved: 2,401.5 gallons of water per pound of cotton according to Vox Magazine
We aspire to more accurate measurements! If you’d like to get involved with measuring and reporting, please reach out!
