GIRO Textile Project Announcement

GIRO has recently made the very difficult decision to change the direction of the
ReLove Local product line. Due to financial considerations we’ve had to lay off our
passionate and dedicated ReLove Manager, Rachel St-Hilaire, and greatly reduce the
products our talented makers have been creating.

Creating new beautiful products from the community’s textile waste has been a huge
learning process with many unforeseen challenges and costs. Unfortunately, those
costs and challenges exceed our ability to sustain the project as we had hoped. We are
hopeful that we can scale back and change the program to still be able to showcase
what can be created from a textile waste stream. 

The ReLove Local products that have been created to date make up about 3% of the
overall textile waste that GIRO receives, the remaining 97% is sitting in our sea can
storage container waiting to be shredded. These textiles are unsuitable for upcycling
because they are mostly polyester, a poly-cotton blend, worn out or unsuitable for
ReLove Local products. As the shred makes up the largest portion of potential waste
diversion, going forward we will be focusing on utilizing our remaining resources on
getting the shredding operation up and running and developing contracts with
manufacturers interested in using an alternative recycled product for stuffed
applications.

Once our sea can storage has been emptied, we will be opening the doors for folks to
drop off their clean textiles that they would like shredded. 

We would like to thank the community for continuing to support this project and a big
thanks to Rachel for her contribution to the project.
GIRO