This term has seen the relaunch of a exciting project and the beginning of a new one during a single day. On 10th October, our Sustainability Champion, David Chapman, in conjunction with the Students’ Union (SU) continued Warwick’s focus on preventing waste by running a new POP Swap event which provides students with the opportunity to exchange costume items every Tuesday from 12-4pm. This idea sprung up after we saw the popularity of our clothing Swap Shop, which runs regularly throughout each term, and a understanding of how many costume items are wasted or left unused by our community. Named POP Swap after the Wednesday night POP! Nightclub event run by the SU which sees many costumes each week. The first event went well, with a number of swaps and a few ‘pay as you feel’ purchases. We are looking forward to seeing this event grow.

Following the POP Swap, David raced over to our Engineering building’s Makerspace area to bring back the reStore project to campus. This had been regularly running previous to the COVID-19 Pandemic and provided staff and students an opportunity to mend, upcycle and make items. With a number of volunteers who bought their own expertise of fixing things, the event was able to fix a Henry Hoover with intermittent motivator issues and a faulty laptop, whilst providing advice for a number of other items unable to be fixed on the night. Going forward we wish to help educate individuals to not throw items away, but to learn how to fix items themselves whether it be an electrical item, a bike, an item of clothing or something else.