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"There's no catch": Latina activists are giving away thousands of free clothes in LA

Radical Clothes Swap is "a bad-ass group of stylish WOC who’ve made clothing swaps cool."

Credit: Radical Clothes Swap

Radical Clothes Swaps are changing the way we think about fashion.

The clothing world has changed drastically over the past 100 years, as we've witnessed the rise of fast fashion, with companies like Shein, Zara, H&M, and Fashion Nova now dominating the marketplace. As a result, it is estimated that the average American tosses 81.5 pounds of clothes away each year, contributing to the growing global textile waste crisis. However, in Los Angeles, a bad-ass team of Latina activists are putting their community activist roots to good use, combating fast fashion’s pro-waste ethos with a simple mission: free clothes for all.

Founded in 2021, Radical Clothes Swap (RCS) goes beyond thrift stores or apps like Depop, where users can sell second-hand clothing. It’s a revolutionary movement that asks us to challenge our assumptions about waste, consumption, and community care—and makes sure we look good while doing it. “In a capitalistic world, what’s the most radical thing you can do? Give resources away for free while helping the environment? Say no more,” declares Nicole Macias, co-founder and CEO of Radical Clothes Swap.


clothing swap, sign, free, donations, recyclingThe monthly events are refreshingly straightforward and have a huge impact on the community.Credit: Radical Clothes Swap

Radical Clothes Swap is a woman of color-owned, donation-based clothing swap that hosts monthly events throughout Los Angeles. It’s a refreshingly straightforward concept: people can donate up to 10 gently used items of clothing (with the exception of shoes and bags) and anyone, whether they’ve donated or not, can take home as many pieces of clothing as they want. See a shirt that your partner would look great in? Grab it, no questions asked. These clothes are for all, no exceptions.

“What we’ve created is beautiful because when it comes to Black and Brown folks, we’re not used to being given anything for free. People will often give us confused looks when we tell them the clothes are free. They expect there to be a catch, but there is no catch at all.” - Janninne Mancilla to Refinery29


Nicole Macias, a community organizer based in Northeast LA, met her RCS co-founder, Janninne Mancilla (the company’s social media and Marketing Manager) on Instagram, where the two connected over a “shared love of fashion and community” and decided to join forces. The rest of the team formed naturally, with Enri Navarro (RCS' Graphic Designer and Swap Manager) and Nikki Hernandez (Website Manager and Consultant), who were both already community advocates and friends of the co-founders.


@radicalclothesswap Our free monthly Sip & Swap is back at Angel City Brewery! Grab a miche and get your swap on 💞 every second Saturday of the month. #sustainablehotgirlsummer #radicalclothesswap #raddiebaddies #freeclothesforall #LosAngelesClothesSwap #angelcitybrewery #ilovemicheladas ♬ La Quebradora - Banda El Recodo

“We’re a bad-ass group of stylish WOC who’ve made clothing swaps cool,” reads the description on Radical Clothes Swap’s website. “Passionate about making the world a better (and less trashy place), each of us devotes our time and energy for free to this radical sustainable fashion cause, often storing the donated clothes and clothing swap equipment in our homes and car trunks.”

Recycling clothes is a radical act

The fashion industry is notorious for its encouragement of overconsumption, and is one of the world’s largest polluters, contributing 92 million tons of textile waste annually. Let’s visualize that: 92 million tons, or 184 billion pounds of waste. To get rid of that many clothes, the BBC estimates that a full dump truck would have to be emptied into a landfill every second for an entire year. Why so much waste? It’s reported that the average garment is only worn between seven to ten times before it’s thrown away. No, not given away, or sold, or donated. Thrown away.


Earth.org provides further disturbing facts. If no action is taken in the next fifteen years, the apparel industry’s global emissions will increase by 50% by 2030. The fashion industry is also responsible for 20% of global water waste, thanks to dyeing, finishing, and the production of materials like yarn and fiber. Ten percent of the ocean’s microplastic pollution comes from textiles, thanks to cheap materials like nylon and polyester, which shed microfilaments every time they’re washed and dried—then flow directly into the sewers. And if you’ve ever seen Finding Nemo, you know where that leads: our beloved oceans.

Oh, and did you know that returned clothes aren’t commonly resold? Two point six million tons of returned clothes end up in landfills—and that’s just in the United States. Just the act of returning clothes leaves an immense carbon footprint: in 2020, it was estimated that 16 million tons of CO2 emissions were released into the atmosphere because of online returns in America, which is the equivalent of 3.5 million cars driving non-stop for an entire year.

clothes, rack, reused, recycle, sustainabilityA patron browsing the selection at a Radical Clothes Swap event.Credit: Radical Clothes Swap

Well, that was a bummer, wasn’t it? Now, for the good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. Radical Clothes Swap has already made major strides towards a more sustainable future. One fashionista’s trash is another one’s treasure, and at RCS events, old garments lovingly gain new owners, extending their lifecycle by untold numbers of years.

“Our entire ethos is all about community and resource sharing,” shared Macias with VoyageLA in 2024. “We’re trying to decrease consumption and play with what you can do with what you have.”

Ready to radicalize your local clothing community? Luckily, the Radical Clothes Swap team has created a simple step-by-step template.


  1. Start a pile. Go through your closet and select three to five clothing items that have, in your heart, lost their luster. Whether it’s too big, too small, or fits just right but is in a pattern you find abhorrent these days, take this as a sign it’s time to move on. As a courtesy, make sure that each piece of clothing is actually gently used, not torn to shreds (Radical Clothes Swaps are not for worn-down hand-me-downs. If your item is unwearable, consider using a verified recycling outlet, like For Days). On clothing swap day, garments should be in good condition (ex. washed, neatly folded, lint-rolled, etc.)
  2. Round up your friends. Plan a date and start inviting! Be mindful and try your best to curate an inclusive swap, where all sizes, body types, and genders feel welcomed and are represented.
  3. Swap! This is the fun part. Make sure the environment is clean and ready to go beforehand, then it’s game time, baby. Blast your favorite tunes or consider serving a few snacks or drinks for an elevated vibe.
  4. Rinse and repeat. Then, it’s time to do it all over again.

“Sustainable fashion is not a one and done thing. Consistently buying second-hand and swapping your clothes for free can reduce the amount of clothing that ends up in landfills every year,” RCS reminds. “You can do your part (and save money) by hosting clothing swaps in your community. Love your clothes; love the planet!”

NOTE: Radical Clothes Shop is donations-based. To support their mission, consider donating on Venmo (@radicalclothesshop) or gift them a WordPress subscription.



Brought to you by Radical Clothes Swap's Venmo
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Science

The world's monster plastic problem could be thwarted by mutant bacteria

It sounds like something straight out of a comic book, but the prospects are very real.

CockrellSchool/Youtube

The world could be saved by bacteria

Plastic has been taking over our world for a while now.

You may not think too much about it, but plastic is a global crisis. A recent rundown in The National Review reveals that more than 8 million tons of plastic is regularly deposited in the ocean. It's killing sea life, endangering coral reefs, and affecting the fish we eat because of the toxins they ingest.

So much for a happy, carefree day, right?

But there's some good news on the horizon: Scientists have found a mutant bacteria that eats plastic.

Of course, this mutant bacteria isn't exactly like the kind of mutants you see in movies and comic books. Although, I'll admit I initially thought, "Good! Someone's finally getting Storm to handle this whole climate change business." How cool would that be?

So maybe Professor X isn't coming out of hiding to help us with our global problems, but the reality of this news is just as exciting. According to The Guardian, an international team of scientists have mutated a bacteria's enzyme to fully break down plastic bottles.

The plastic-eating bacteria was first discovered in 2016 in Japan. Researchers studying plastic pollution — specifically polyethylene terephthalate or PET — discovered a colony of bacteria that fed on the plastic, breaking down strong chemical bonds as a means of survival. The bacteria back then, though, was eating through highly crystallized PET — the material plastic bottles are made of — at a slow rate. Researchers knew it would take a while for the bacteria to evolve into the environmental savior we need.

Scientists started studying the bacteria's evolution and discovered they'd unintentionally made it stronger.

"It's alive! It's alive!" they screamed. That's how I imagine the discovery of this mutated bacteria enzyme went, with all the blinking lights and klaxons of a superhero movie. That's what happens in labs, right?

Well, that's how it should have gone. Because this is exciting! After viewing a 3D model of the bacteria, scientists discovered that small modifications could make its enzymes much more effective. The BBC reports that PET takes "hundreds of years" to break down on its own, but with the modified enzyme, called PETase, the same process begins within a matter of days. The enzyme breaks down PET to its original building blocks, meaning that the plastic can be reused again without losing quality.

recycling, reusable, plastic bottles, PET, enzymes

A large blocked cube made up of plastic bottles.

Image via Pixabay.

Here's why this is important: You may think plastic bottles are recycled into new plastic bottles and that every bottle you drink from had a rich and beautiful life before it came to you, but that's not true. In 2017, BuzzFeed reported that Coca-Cola sourced only 7% of its plastic from recycled material and only 6% of Nestle's bottles were made from recycled plastic. The rest of all that single-use plastic being dumped is turned into other fibers like carpet and clothing.

This is because plastics degrade as they're recycled. "Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill," the BBC notes.

But PETase makes it possible to use PET in its original form over and over again.

We're only at the beginning of this development.

On one hand, PETase could bring us closer to true recycling (producing much less plastic and using much less fossil fuel) than ever before. But the research has only started. The breaking down process still needs to be made faster, so it could be years before PETase or anything like it is used on an industrial scale.

While scientists keep working to make PETase a worldwide plastic problem-solver, we can all do our part by reducing our reliance on plastic. Little things — like a reusable bottle for the gym, keeping metal utensils at work, and reusable bags and totes for trips to the store — can help keep the Earth clean, save animals, and make us a little less reliant on mutants (er, mutant enzymes) to save the day.

Curious to learn more? Watch the video below:


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The Coca-Cola Company
Recycled Records
Sponsored

Spin your own sustainable music with the Recycled Records beat machine

All photos courtesy of The Coca-Cola Company

Behind the Scenes Making Recycled Records with Mark Ronson

True

You’re walking down the sidewalk, earbuds in, listening to your favorite hip-hop beats. As your head bobs to the sounds, the sun warms your back. It’s a perfect day.

When the chorus hits, the empty Sprite bottle in your hand becomes a drumstick, passing traffic becomes a sea of concertgoers, and the concrete beneath your feet is suddenly a stage. Spinning on your heels, you close out the song with your face to the sky and hands in the air.

Spotting a bright blue bin, you chuck in your imaginary drumstick. The sound that echoes back is satisfyingly cool, a deep, reverberating clunk so loud you can hear it over the music.

That is the sound of recycling.

Imagine how harmonious it would sound to mix the tones of millions of bottles going through the recycling process—the melody of all of us doing our part?

The Coca-Cola Company recognizes its responsibility to help address the world’s plastic packaging crisis. Several of the company’s most popular brands were historically made in green plastic bottles—however, when green plastic is recycled, it is usually turned into single-use items that do not get recycled again. To take one more step toward greater sustainability, Sprite, Fresca and Seagram’s are now being packaged in clear plastic bottles, increasing the likelihood of them being recycled over and over again—a process known as “closed loop recycling.”

Surprisingly enough, closed loop recycling and music have a lot in common. Music producers typically use a technique called sound sampling: the process of taking an old sound, chopping it up, and flipping it into a completely new beat. Just like the process of recycling, old can be new in sound sampling. An old sound is used in a new track, which is morphed again into a newer track, and so on. Beats being made today will be recycled by another creative in the future. Que Uptown Funk!

To celebrate the shift from green to clear, The Coca-Cola Company partnered with iconic, genre-defining/defying producers Mark Ronson and Madlib to create the world’s first album composed of the sounds of the plastic recycling process itself. The Recycled Records EP uses real ambient sounds sampled from various points in the closed-loop recycling chain at four different recycling facilities scattered across the United States. From the percussion of a forklift beeping, to the tonal beat of a conveyor belt, to the hi-hat of air blown into a plastic bottle, the EP brings to life the magic of multiple reuses.

“It sounds very crazy to say it, but anything can become a sample…any sound can be manipulated. The sound of opening a barrel of plastic has its own funk and flow to it,” said Ronson.

Not only did The Coca-Cola Company find a way to literally turn the sounds of recycling into music, thanks to the Recycled Records Beat Machine, you can be part of that process, too. Using the site, music enthusiasts are able to remix the very same recycled sound library used by Ronson and Madlib into innovative compositions of their own through an interactive, one-of-a-kind digitized version of an 808 beat machine. Generally, the biggest obstacle for many aspiring artists is accessing the proper musical technology, which is yet another reason why Recycled Records is so dang cool—this beat machine is free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Innovation and creativity are the way of the future; tap into yours today by creating a Recycled Record of your very own. Maybe someday, other people will be dancing down the street listening to YOUR beats!

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Sustainably good news: Recycling is getting better and this family is showing us how

What if instead of focusing on what isn’t working, we looked at these stories as an invitation to do better?

Via Ridwell

Ryan Metzger and son Owen

There is no shortage of dire news about the state of modern recycling. Most recently, this NPR article shared the jaw-dropping statistic that about 5% of all plastics produced get recycled, meaning the rest of it ends up in landfills. While the underlying concerns here are sound, I worry that the public narrative around recycling has gotten so pessimistic that it will make people give up on it entirely instead of seeing the opportunities to improve it. What if instead of focusing on what isn’t working, we looked at these news stories as an invitation to do better?


This question isn’t rhetorical for me; it’s been the motivation behind how I’ve spent the past five years of my life. It started when my son Owen asked me how we could recycle our dead batteries where we live in Seattle. After making a few phone calls and realizing how complicated it was, we made it a weekend project to pick up our neighbor’s batteries along with other hard-to-recycle items.This novel approach of having your hard-to-recycle stuff “carpool” with your neighbors quickly caught on in Seattle. Our rapidly growing community was looking at their junk drawers with new eyes, felt inspired to be part of something bigger, and kept asking what else we could pick up.

This enthusiasm turned my family’s passion project into Ridwell, a company whose mission it is to make it easy to deal with hard-to-recycle materials like plastics, light bulbs, batteries, & more. We pick up where curbside recyclers leave off, providing our members in six states with a way to recycle and reuse materials right from their doorsteps. In 2022 alone, our community kept more than one million pounds of hard-to-recycle plastic film out of landfills. To date, we’ve kept more than ten million pounds of hard-to-recycle materials from going to waste. All of this impact started with a simple, optimistic reframe. Instead of dwelling on what our curbside service couldn’t take, we instead asked ourselves how we could help.

Ryan Metzger, Founder and CEO of Ridwell

Via Ridwell

It’s been a lot of work to be sure, but what’s kept me motivated on this journey has been learning about all of the exceptional efforts happening elsewhere to make recycling work better for everyone. Our elected officials are creating new policies that powerfully shift market incentives, like Maine’s law that makes companies pay for their own recycling or California’s law that creates more demand for recycled plastic. Engineers are developing new ways to recycle tricky plastics, while citizens across the country are raising awareness about the need for government and corporations to do more. 

The longer I’ve worked in the recycling space, the more I’ve found allies and collaborators who are finding surprising uses for materials that used to be dismissed as trash. Trex has pioneered a method of turning soft plastics like grocery bags into high-performance decking for homes. Companies like ByFusion and Arqlite are turning multilayer plastic packaging once considered unrecyclable into building materials and hydroponics gravel. The types of innovations we’ll need to solve our recycling crisis are all around us; we just need to keep connecting these pockets of innovation into a more holistic system of reuse and recycling.

So while the news cycle around recycling can often feel overwhelming, I always encourage people to use these grim statistics as motivation to lean into the challenge and look for solutions. For some people, that’s calling their legislators, and for others, it’s coming up with new packaging that has a smaller environmental footprint. For those of us at Ridwell, it’s about how we can help make it easy for households to keep hard-to-recycle materials out of the landfill. As the past decade has shown us, the overwhelming “Pacman-shaped” chunk of the pie chart often shows us where the most impactful innovations must come from and where the next wave of businesses must focus. Yes, we are at an inflection point when it comes to addressing the problems posed by excessive waste in this country. To be honest, I’ve never felt more optimistic that we have what it takes to address this problem, together.


Ryan Metzger is a guest contributor to Upworthy and founder and CEO of Ridwell

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