I found the brand new £75 Next dress still with its £75 price tag intact in Minchinhampton's Longfield Care charity shop for a bargain £10. The black Laura Ashley wool & cashmere cardigan with sequin trim was a perfect match - won for £2 on Ebay.
With so much clothes waste in the world it just feels immoral to spend hard earned money on something that will literally never wear out. I mean, how many times am I going to want to wear a sequin dress in a year?
According to an article in The Guardian, clothing has become the fastest growing waste stream in the UK and many people don't recycle their clothes simply because they don't realise that there's any worth in worn out or dirty clothes. Every year an estimated 300,000 tonnes of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK; in the USA the figure is close to 1.5million tonnes.
The Love Your Clothes website aims to help change the way the UK consumers buy, use and dispose of their clothing. Their ultimate aim is to reduce the environmental impact of clothing across the UK and "influence a more circular approach to clothing globally" (which sounds a bit like blue sky thinking, or thinking outside the box, but possibly means recycling more clothes).
Anyway, the satisfaction I got from my recycled bargains was - in the words of a certain credit card company whose sole aim is to make us spend spend spend - priceless.