By Isabelle Atkins for Grady Newsource.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Georgia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Picture a mountain of discarded material, towering as big as the University of Georgia’s 200,000-square-foot Miller Learning Center, destined for the landfill.
That is the size of the 10 million pounds of materials UGA sends to the landfill each year. But through the doors of that same building is a place where unwanted items can be traded instead of discarded.
In 2021, two UGA students, Jenna Franke and Avery Lumsden, started Swap Shop to lessen overconsumption and waste on campus.
The clothing industry has become one of the most polluting. According to the World Wildlife Fund, making one cotton shirt takes 2,700 liters of water. Then when those clothes are thrown away, they can take over 200 years to decompose in landfills. During decomposition, textiles generate greenhouse methane gas and leach toxic chemicals and dyes into the soil and groundwater.
But Franke and Lunsden remembered the old saying: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
With the help of a grant from the University of Georgia’s Office of Sustainability and a partnership with UGA libraries, they set up a small room on the second floor of the Miller Learning Center. The room holds clothes, shoes, textbooks and other household items that once belonged to members of the Athens community and are ready to be traded.
Saumya Malik, director of marketing and communications for Swap Shop, says that as fast fashion is on the rise, sustainable practices are needed more than ever.
“There has been a rise of fast fashion, which has really accelerated these trend cycles in a way that people are buying new clothes every season and because they are buying new clothes, they are not using the ones that they were using earlier, and they are not mending things as much,” Malik says.
At Swap Shop’s repair workshops, they provide materials and teach people how to fix their items, such as mending a hole or replacing a missing button.
Not only is overconsumption costly to the environment, but people are suffering too. Sara Idacavage, a fashion historian and sustainable fashion educator, says that the bombardment of advertising we access through technology makes us more susceptible to overconsumption.
“Our phones really kind of tell us to buy more and more, so I think it is perfectly natural to overconsume in today’s day and age,” Idacavage says. “The problem is that we are so disconnected from the people who are making the clothing that not everyone even stops to question ‘how could a shirt possibly be $3.99…’”
According to Idacavage, it is not possible to produce clothing for that cheap unless someone else is being exploited, such as through wage slavery or pollution. Even the people living in the surrounding areas of these factories are negatively impacted due to pollutants entering their food and water supply as dyes find their way into local waterways. Yet buying reliable pieces or second-hand provides an inexpensive solution.
In the fall of 2023, Swap Shop says they diverted 872 pounds of trash from the landfill, and since its founding, the effort has saved 2,709 pounds from the landfill.
One of Swap Shop’s most familiar faces is Abigail Ventimiglia. Since her sophomore year, she has stopped by the shop about once a week to drop off her used items and see if she can swap anything. She notes that a common misconception is that you must give something away to receive an item. However, if you have nothing to give away, you can still receive items and contribute to extending its life cycle.
“I go like every week and all of the staff, or volunteers, know me, and it’s just this very fun community, where I show up, we chit-chat for like 15 minutes and then I leave. It’s a very small, but important highlight of my week,” Ventimiglia says.
Although Swap Shop does not take any items with major quality issues, sometimes clothes need alterations or small repairs. For Ventimiglia, this is actually a positive.
“I actually think it’s a very fun opportunity like I started doing embroidery during the pandemic, but I ran into this issue where I love my clothes. I’ve spent so much money and time finding them, I don’t want to just ruin it on my amateur embroidery, but with the Swap Shop, if something has a stain or a little cut, and I need to fix it I can just make that my next embroidery project,” Ventimiglia says while showing three flowers neatly embroidered into her green t-shirt.
Isabelle Atkins wrote this article for Grady Newsource.
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This week, four tribal nations and environmental groups urged the Michigan Court of Appeals to overturn the state's approval of Enbridge's Line 5 tunnel project.
Attorneys for the groups argued the pipeline expansion threatens the Great Lakes and disregards tribal and ecological concerns. They are asking the state to consider a wider range of alternatives to the dual pipelines that carry crude oil and natural gas liquids beneath the Straits of Mackinac.
Carrie La Seur, legal director of the group For Love of Water in Traverse City, said the aging pipelines pose a real spill risk to lakes Michigan and Huron, citing Michigan's Environmental Protection Act for support.
"We argued that Michigan's Environmental Protection Act requires a really comprehensive look at feasible and prudent alternatives to any action that would create environmental damage," La Seur explained.
Enbridge released a statement saying in part the state's decision to approve the application for the Great Lakes Tunnel Project came after a tremendous investment of time and deliberation by the Michigan Public Service Commission and staff. For nearly four years they carefully examined the complex issue and considered many viewpoints, questions, concerns and ideas.
La Seur said the pipeline project is massive and unprecedented, involving drilling more than 300 feet beneath the land and extending more than four miles. She warned it could create even greater risks and complications.
"It would be transporting flammable product. It would require a lot of very challenging maintenance if there were ever a problem. Any type of spill cleanup would be extremely challenging," La Seur outlined. "There are all kinds of reasons why this tunnel presents some unique challenges."
The court has yet to make a decision in the case. Enbridge also needs a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which delayed its review of the project in 2023. The Corps plans to release its draft environmental report this spring.
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The U.S. Forest Service is facing a lawsuit from Montana conservation groups for authorizing a major logging project in a critical wildlife habitat. The Round Star logging project, located 13 miles west of Whitefish, would cover over 9,000 acres of forest land in an area inhabited by Canada lynx and grizzly bears. Both are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act, which means they should take priority in logging plans.
Steve Kelly, president of the Council of Wildlife and Fish, is one of the plaintiffs.
"It's already been logged heavily, so we're really talking about some of the last places that lynx can even survive locally, never mind connectivity from one place to another," he said.
According to Alliance for the Wild Rockies, the Round Star project doesn't properly take into account the cumulative effects of nearby projects, which total about 42,000 acres of logging and burning and 100 miles of new roads.
A federal court judge in 2023 ruled against the Forest Service on a project in the Kootenai National Forest that similarly threatened grizzly bear habitats. Kelly wonders why the agency continues to attempt passing projects without adequate analysis of their effects.
"The court now is quite adept at figuring out who's doing what and why and applying the law. So there's really not much wiggle room anymore for the agencies to slide one by," he continued.
Canada lynx require habitat with dense forests and deep snow that also support populations of snowshoe hare, which make up about 75% of the lynx diet.
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By Yessenia Funes for Next City and Yale Climate Connections.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Georgia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
In Atlanta's Cascade neighborhood, a Black church has operated a community center next door for decades. The recently renovated space is simple inside - white walls and gray carpet - but that's where the magic happens. There, the congregation runs a weekly food pantry where they feed up to 400 predominantly Black families a week. Now, with financial help from the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate law passed by Democrats during the Biden administration, the church is offering even more services - by making the center the first community-owned resiliency hub in the city.
The Vicars Community Center, which held its ribbon-cutting ceremony in July, is outfitted with solar panels and battery storage that can provide enough energy to power the building for three days should there be a blackout and no sunlight. The center is prepared to serve as an emergency shelter for locals in the face of a power outage. In the era of fossil fuel-powered hurricanes and heat waves, frontline community members need a safe place to turn when the lights go out.
"It really fit into what we're already trying to do," says Pastor Kevin Earley of Community Church Atlanta, which worked with the clean energy nonprofit Groundswell to develop the resiliency hub in its community center. "We want to be the place that people turn to in the good times and the bad."
From 2000 to 2023, extreme weather caused 80% of power outages, according to the research and communications group Climate Central. Just last month, Hurricane Helene knocked out power for some 5.5 million people in the Southeast and Midwest. Some families were left in the dark for three weeks. Thanks to federal tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, people in this neighborhood will now have a place to charge their phones, refrigerate their medicines, and plug in life-saving medical devices if an extreme weather event cuts electricity off to their homes. What's more, the center's solar panels reduce planet-warming emissions - and save them $6,000 a year in energy costs.
Despite President-elect Donald Trump's promise to slash the law that helped make the resiliency hub possible, developers don't expect the new administration's plans to affect them. Even if Trump kills the extremely popular direct-pay tax credits program, where the federal government issues payouts to entities that have built qualified clean energy projects, the team in Atlanta will be filing for the IRA credits by May 2025 for the 2024 tax year.
It would be an unlikely logistical nightmare for the president-elect's administration to attempt a tax restructuring that would repeal credits retroactively, explains Friends of the Earth climate and energy justice deputy director Lukas Shankar-Ross. However, other communities of color hoping to tap into IRA dollars to fund similar safety nets in their hometowns may have limited time to take advantage of the law's full benefits before Trump and his allies in Congress cut them.
"It is now our responsibility to shout from the mountaintops how good and impactful these tax credits are for local community and economic development," says Matthew Wesley Williams, senior vice president of community development at Groundswell. The organization partnered with the church to raise money for the solar panels and find the capital needed to own the setup without additional debt. "Organizations that support community resilience like churches, small municipalities, and rural utilities need these resources to stand firm and sustain their local impact."
The effort to create the resiliency hub came together in 2023 when Groundswell reached out to Pastor Earley after activists identified Community Church Atlanta as a key resource during local info-gathering meetings. At the height of the pandemic, Vicars Community Center offered COVID-19 tests and vaccines. It hosts meetings for local groups, as well as blood drives and low-cost health checks.
Groundswell connected the organization to $225,000 in donated philanthropic funding to upgrade the center with solar panels and batteries. The nonprofit will also soon help church leaders tap into those IRA tax credits. The nonprofit sees Vicars as a demonstration that can build support for other community-owned, small-scale solar projects, Williams says. Groundswell has been seeding similar resilience hubs elsewhere in Atlanta and Baltimore.
A majority of the residents who live within a half-mile radius of Vicars are Black, according to data from an Environmental Protection Agency mapping tool. Over half are low-income. They also suffer higher rates of asthma, heart disease, and lower life expectancy than the national and state averages. Nearly a quarter lack access to health care or the internet.
"Folks in our neighborhood who can't drive away or get away now have a place just to even charge their cell phones or get information to be picked up or to receive help," Pastor Earley says.
Churches are a perfect way to introduce Black residents to clean energy initiatives, says Markeya Thomas, the Black engagement senior adviser at Climate Power, a communications group focused on clean energy.
"All throughout history, Black people have had to rely on the church to be able to survive the world that we are existing in," Thomas says.
Pastor Earley is planning ahead to ensure the center's fridges are stocked with food and water for the day an emergency arises. He's exploring options to protect the building during high winds to make it structurally stronger. The solar panels can provide energy, but that's only if the building itself remains out of harm's way. Questions remain over how to make the space a safe overnight facility with cots and security, but the church is starting to map that all out.
Community Church Atlanta has a mission to serve the community, including those who are not of faith. Now, their food pantry can expand to feed more families with the money saved from the reduced energy bills. They fed some 32,000 people last year. In the coming years, the plan is to feed even more.
Yessenia Funes wrote this article for Next City and Yale Climate Connections.
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