by Cloey Parlapiano and Ruth Ellis
Happy Valentine’s Day! A year ago today was the grand opening of UNE’s own Surplus With A Purpose (S.W.A.P.) Shop. We wanted to take this time to look back at our journey. The concept of the S.W.A.P. shop was included in UNE’s very first Climate Action Plan in 2010. It wasn’t until nine students chose the development of an on-campus thrift shop as their project for the Millennium Fellowship, that the idea grew legs. The goal of the Millennium Fellows was to reduce waste on campus, while also giving students a place to find items on a college student’s budget. Clothing accounts for 2-10% of people’s environmental impact (Farrant et al., 2010), and we wanted to change that.
On the day of our grand opening, we welcomed 112 visitors from the UNE community! Since then, we have made over 650 transactions in the shop. Looking back at our success this past year to date, we have helped give a new life to over 1,660 items. These include things like casual and business clothes, games, school supplies, jewelry, dorm essentials, and more. Our top items this year were t-shirts, jewelry, long sleeved shirts, dishes, short sleeves/tank tops, sweaters, skirts and shorts, outerwear, and pants.
The shop has received many donations from students, faculty, staff, and also took in many materials left behind by students at the end of the school year at an event we call “Switch or Ditch”, keeping tons out of landfills. We have also found ways to extend the use of items that we can’t sell in the S.W.A.P. Shop, by bringing items to places like Goodwill and Impact Apparel, which is an organization that takes in clothes that can no longer be worn, and recycles them into something new.
We are grateful to Bangor Savings Bank for helping us with start-up costs, and UNE for providing us with a great space in the heart of campus, and Earth’s E.C.O. for providing us with a “financial home” within student activities. Raising money was never the goal, and we price most items between $1 and $5, but we have raised a bit of funds so far and we are looking forward to finding an important sustainability project to support.
Thank you for welcoming us this past year, and we can’t wait to see what the coming years bring!
