The Idea...

The LSE Second Life Festival is a swap shop designed to help students swap their unwanted items while picking up useful new stuff for free. The festival will encourage students to swap clothes, books and anything else you can think of to help save money and the planet. The event will also include workshops on how to make your own household products and a film on the environmental costs of 'fast fashion’.

Well why?

How many times have you thrown an item that was in perfectly good condition but you don’t use anymore?

How many times have you bought an item from a shop that you could have got cheaper and just as easily 2nd hand?

University students like us in particular have this problem – both because they’re living on a student budget and because they’re moving away from home.

This isn’t a problem unique to students. In the average UK household, nearly a third of clothes haven’t been worn in the last year.

300,000 tonnes of clothes are sent to landfills in the UK every year – that’s the same weight as the Empire State Building, or about 30 times the Eiffel Tower!

So what's the solution?

This issue could easily be addressed, as the wise man Macklemore once said:

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure!”

This is where our campaign comes in!

So what is it exactly...?

We are going to create the 2nd Life Festival, a London School of Economics community event that we will set up to allow students to swap unwanted items. This will be in the SU building, on the LSE campus and will be in August, when students start moving out.

On top of making students’ lives easier and providing a space for new friendships to be made, we will also be raising awareness on the environmental consequences of the single-use item culture.

Second hand clothing is now considered cool with vintage fairs and pop-ups everywhere, in fact all of us are wearing something that’s been given a second life. We’ll leave you to guess which items we’ve swapped!

The ins and outs:

We’re going to run the 2nd Life Festival with two side events during the swap shop: We’ll have a workshop showing people how to make their own products (such as washing up liquid and deodorant) and screening the ‘True Cost’ documentary, on the fast fashion industry. We aim to bring together at least 50 students together in the festival.

We’re going to promote the festival through Facebook, LSE departments and posters around campus.

After the event, we will send out a newsletter to all the participants and set up a Facebook group to continue this campaign and let people swap things online. The newsletter will have recipes from the workshops and tips to reduce waste.

We hope to carry this on in years to come!