Good morning teachers and fellow NYJCians, we are from group NY106 and we are here to present to you our project titled Textile Saviours. First up, we would like to present to you a skit highlighting the causes of textile wastage. So sit back, relax, and enjoy.

What you’ve just seen is one of the few causes of textile wastage. Clearly, disposing textiles can lead to very severe consequences. My name is Si Yuan and I will be discussing several causes of textile wastage, while my second speaker, Sock Yii, will be elaborating on the impacts of textile wastage. My third speaker, Harsh, will be telling you all about our third strategy, e-textiles, which is a web-based strategy, and Benjamin, our fourth speaker, will be giving you details about our second strategy, Love Textiles Campaign. Our last speaker, Chee Wei will be giving you a thorough analysis of our strategies and concluding our presentation.

First up, let’s start with some statistics obtained from the National Environment Agency in Singapore. In 2009, the total textile waste output is at about 109 thousand tonnes. This gradually increased over the years, to about 130 thousand tonnes in 2011. However, as we can see here, the amount of textile waste recycled throughout these recent years is relatively low at about 12%.

Take a look at this picture of old clothes for example. As fashion trend changes, people buy more and more new clothes to keep up with the fashion trend. But then what happens to the old clothes?

Hence, we decided to conduct a survey among 100 households in this district to gain more information.

Among our survey respondents, 65% of households told us that they purchase new clothes monthly.

However, 70% of the households dispose of their old clothes.

Why do they do that? So we asked them their reasons for disposing their unwanted textiles and here are the answers we got.

From our survey findings, the first reason households gave was the lack of incentive to recycle textiles. By selling their unwanted textiles to the rag-and-bone man, they receive monetary benefits. Hence, households would keep their unwanted textiles for the event that the rag-and-bone-man comes along, or they would just dispose of them.

The second reason households gave was the problem of inconvenience. Take person A who lives in Jurong for example. He takes twenty whole minutes by private transport just to travel to the nearest Salvation Army point in Bukit Timah to donate his unwanted textiles. Furthermore, Salvation Army is the only place in Singapore where you can donate textiles, and as you can see here, there are very few Salvation Army points around Singapore. Given that Salvation Army not only collects

textiles but also other types of items such as furniture, there is currently no concerted effort in Singapore to recycle textiles. Also, from our skit, there are even people who are unaware of the existence of the Salvation Army.

Last but not least, 7 out of 10 people we surveyed are unaware of the negative impacts of textile wastage, and hence continue to dispose of their unwanted textiles. What about you? Are you one of these 7 people? Do you know that disposing textiles actually have detrimental effects on our environment and economy? Allow me to pass my time now to Sock Yii who will be sharing with you about these impacts.