Boxes of old uniforms given new purpose at school in Fiji

Belair Public School in Adamstown Heights was in the process of changing over uniforms last year and has since delivered 10 large boxes filled with their old garments to a school in Fiji.

P&C volunteer and uniform shop coordinator Lindsay Wachs said with a stock room full to the brim of old uniforms, there was a need to find a new home and prevent them from going to waste.

"It became very clear, very quickly that we were going to be having a massive amount of donations coming in of the old uniform," she said.

There was an idea to send the clothes to a textile recycling facility, but Ms Wachs fell in love with the idea of donating them to a school in a less advantaged country.

"Textile recycling would have been the next plan, the first goal was to get it to kids who could use them because they're perfectly good articles of clothing," she said.

After eight months of trial and error to find a way to get the uniforms overseas, Ms Wachs went "down a bunch of rabbit holes and got told no a bunch of times".

"I almost gave up but then I managed to get a contact and I was elated because it was exactly what I needed to hear," she said.

She was put in contact with YWAM, a youth mission group who make occasional trips to third world places like Solomon Islands, Papa New Guinea and Fiji.

"They left Australia on a plane with the 10 giant boxes on December 31 last year and were filled with all kinds of jumpers, shirts, skirts and shoes," she said.

The donations arrived in January to Nabua Primary, a school for children aged between kindergarten to eight-years-old, in the village of Rakiraki.

"It all worked out really well and none of this would have been possible if it weren't for the donations and generosity of the community," Ms Wachs said.

According to the NSW EPA only 28 per cent of textiles are recycled and re-used, "which is not sustainable".

With that in mind, Hunter schools are moving towards more sustainable clothing with Islington Public School adopting 100 per cent compostable shirts as their uniforms and St Columban's Primary School, Mayfield using a gold coin donation clothing pool to promote reuse.

St Columban's principal Penny Banister said her school community was passionate about the environment and sustainability as well as helping families in the cost-of-living crisis.

"We have a clothes rack that hangs out in our foyer of clothes that have been donated, basically parents come in and give a gold coin donation - there's no specific prices - and they find what they need," she said.

"Our community is really aware there's people out there that need support and we are focused on the environment, so we try to ensure our uniforms are being passed through students, siblings and not going into the ground as wastage."

Ms Banister said there was also a high number of refugee students that rely on donations when arriving at the school.

"We do get a lot of refugee children here who obviously arrive in our country who have nothing so we do use those second hand clothing to actually clothe these children so that they have a starting uniform," she said.