"It's Just Kind of Sickening": Hanover High Students Turn Fast Fashion Facts Into a Clothing Swap
At Hanover High School's Science Symposium this spring, one freshman summed up what she'd learned about the fashion industry in a single number: there's already enough clothing on Earth to clothe the next six generations, all at once. Ninety-two million tons of it gets wasted every year, worldwide. "It's just kind of sickening," she said.
That reaction is what drove a small group of ninth-grade girls in the school's Environmental Club to spend the spring semester turning a hard fact into something the rest of the school could actually act on.
The club had an unusual year. Every returning leader had graduated, and the students who showed up most reliably to meetings were freshmen, new to the club and, in some cases, new to the school. To start off, they organized a school-wide trash day where students sorted through a day’s trash, only to be surprised and educated about how much stuff actually gets thrown away. Given a range of possible directions to go from there, this group chose fast fashion: the rapid, cheap production of clothing that drives both labor exploitation abroad and enormous textile waste. Advisor Deb Robinson, who ran the club through a year of near-total turnover, said the group surprised her. "I think they went into it thinking, oh yeah, fast fashion is bad, everybody kind of knows that already," she said. "But they did some real research, and somewhere in there it stopped being a thing they'd just heard about."
Working with the school's advisory program, a weekly block where students eat lunch together followed by a short lesson, the students wrote, filmed, and produced their own advisory lesson on fast fashion. It included a short video explaining which popular brands qualify, the environmental and human costs behind them, and alternatives like thrifting and hand-me-downs, and was capped with a Kahoot quiz. Advisories that finished with the top quiz scores earned a pizza party, an incentive Robinson said "definitely helped get people to actually pay attention." She's noticed the same pattern before: "Lessons written by teachers, kids kind of sit through. Lessons written by other students, they actually watch."
But informing people isn't the same as giving them something to do, and the students knew it too. "We informed people first," one of them said afterward. "And obviously that's the start of a lot of ways to solve problems, it's like identifying the problem and learning about it. But that's not enough." So the club did the lesson in March, and after the school's spring break, hosted a clothing swap in the library. Students donated clothes they no longer wanted. Over the following days, anyone could come "shopping" for free. The response outpaced expectations: 162 items were donated, and 96 were rehomed. "It was like a little store," one student said, describing the racks borrowed from the theater department and tables of folded shirts, shorts, and dresses. "It made me so happy."
Robinson traces the same logic through the club's schoolwide waste-sorting demonstration. Her example, offered in an interview about the club's work: toss a jar of chocolate milk into the recycling without rinsing it, and "think about who deals with that in two weeks," an entire bin contaminated, a problem handed off to someone invisible and far away. To her, the fast fashion project ran on the same insight, just with a shirt instead of a jar. "Somebody made it, somewhere," as she put it, "and you don't have to think about that person at all if you don't want to."
For other educators considering a similar project, Robinson pointed to the school's existing advisory structure as the natural entry point. Any school with a recurring shared block of time, a homeroom or advisory period, already has a venue for a student-written lesson. "The hard part isn't logistics," she said. "It's trusting a few freshmen with something real and then actually backing off and letting them run it."
"People were happy about it," one of the students said. "People wanted to do this. And I think that's where it starts, introducing people to ways that they can make small changes to help the planet."
For more information, contact Deb Robinson at deborahrobinson@hanovernorwichschools.org, or the Equitable Climate Action Partnership at info@uvtpc.com or bit.ly/hopefulstories.
