All my socks have holes in them. My favorite red cashmere cardigan, handed down by my aunt, has worn through in both elbows. A treasured scarf weathered a kitchen moth infestation and came out the other end looking like Swiss cheese. A skirt I wear all the time got caught and shredded in a CitiBike wheel.
Many people, faced with worn clothing, wouldn’t think twice about tossing them out. Indeed, in 2024, 120 million metric tons of clothing were discarded across the globe, according to the Boston Consulting Group. That’s something like 800 billion shirts a year — and the number is only growing.
Those discarded clothes often end up burned, in a landfill, or sent overseas, contributing to the literally billions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted by the fashion industry annually.
An abandoned factory full of textile waste in Phnom Penh, which would go on to be repurposed by environmental art project Clothing the Loop. Photo: Francois Le Nguyen/Unsplash
The statistic made me want to do something different with my holey clothes (which, besides, are special to me). So I turned to Brooklyn’s repair ecosystem: the robust and growing community of Repair Cafes, mending workshops, and craftspeople who are sustaining and reviving the once-commonplace art of mending.
The first Repair Cafe — a free, community-based space for people to mend their broken things together, with the assistance of volunteer experts — was held in Amsterdam in 2009. The concept quickly became a massive movement: There are now over 2,500 volunteer-run Repair Cafes around the world, and three in New York City alone. (And they’re not just for clothes. Repair shops can help you fix objects, toys, appliances, bikes and more.)
Brooklyn Repair Cafe, whose goal is to “build a culture of care & repair and slow down the consumption cycle,” meets monthly at Another World in Crown Heights; the next one is on Aug. 30. The Brooklyn Public Library regularly hosts repair cafes and mending circles as well.
For more finicky items, you can turn to the professionals. Just this morning, a neighborhood message board gifted me a comprehensive mending spreadsheet curated by fashion writer Emilia Petrarca: a list of expert-recommended and crowdsourced tailors, cobblers, and more niche repair shops across the city. Break a snap? There’s a shop for that. Need a delicate hole fixed? Try a professional reweaver. Looking for bag, denim, or jewelry repairs? Done, done, and done.
Art shops across Brooklyn host mending workshops on the art of hand-sewing, darning, and the Japanese tradition of sashiko. A mending club called Darn It! meets regularly at Brooklyn’s Textile Art Center, co-hosted by designer Hekima Hapa of @blackgirlssew, artist and designer Martina Cox, and mender and clothes historian Kate Sekules (@visiblemend). This crew just hosted a “Mendathon” on a boat in New York Harbor, complete with sea shanties about visible mending — a popular mending style that highlights fixes rather than hiding them.
An example of (relatively subtle!) visible mending. Photo: Rachel Meade Smith
Visible mending is a celebration of repair, of a culture of longevity and reuse over waste and disposal. Each of these gathering spaces and workshops are an effort to build a different culture around waste, pushing back against an economy in which things aren’t made to last.
Rachel Meade Smith is a Brooklyn-based author, writer, and researcher who co-founded Repair Shop, a public education project around mending, with friend Sam Bennett. For Meade Smith, mending was an answer to her guilt about the waste she generated through textile arts: “I was just like, oh my God, this answers all of my questions about, ‘how am I going to keep doing this work without having to figure out what to do with all this stuff that I'm making?’” she told me.
Rachel Meade Smith in a sweater she mended. Photo: Rachel Meade Smith
She said that having a mending practice changes how she relates to her things: “You start to see these things as having a longer presence in your life. When I'm buying something, I'm like, ‘Would I repair this if it rips?’ And if I wouldn't, I won't buy it,” she said.
But she has no delusions about the true impact of mending, as it stands today, on that mountain of textile waste. “It's not going to make a difference — unless we all start mending our clothes,” she said. “But there's a sense of doing a good thing, and putting your tiny stake in the ground against fast fashion and overconsumption.”
For all the hope of the rapidly-growing Repair Cafe movement, mending will remain only a drip in the bucket of waste while the fashion industry still sends a whopping 30% of its products straight to landfill, unworn.
But it is also a return to an old way of thinking about the lifecycle and value of the things we own and use. And industry follows culture. The real job now is sustaining and spreading that old culture.
“I would love to see it brought into schools. I would love to indoctrinate the children,” Meade Smith said, laughing. “How can we make this foundational to people's lives instead of a thing that people who have the privilege of time can take on?”
I’ll start with my socks.
– Ella Spungen, Editor, Bluedot Living Brooklyn
Climate News, In Brief
Flood Protections: NYC’s Bureau of Coastal Resilience, whose job it is to protect the city’s coastlines from floods and rising sea levels, just grew twelvefold. Mayor Mamdani committed $43.2 million to bolstering the BCR, allowing them to hire 69 more employees.
And Flood Damages: The Federal Small Business Association will distribute low-interest disaster loans to New York businesses, residents, and nonprofits who were impacted by severe flooding on May 20. Applications here.
Green-Wood Green-Way: City Council approved $4 million of funding to Green-Wood to transform a section of road alongside the perimeter of the cemetery into a green corridor for pedestrians and cyclists.
Dollars for Stewards: City Parks Foundation will provide grant funding for mid-size organizations dedicated to stewarding New York City’s parks and open spaces through their Treetops Grant Program. Applications opened Monday and will close Aug. 14.
March of the Buffalo: Over 50 life-size buffalo puppets will parade through downtown Brooklyn in September for “Return Of The Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi,” a production hosted by St. Ann’s Warehouse. The parade, created by Amir Nizar Zuabi in partnership with Lenape and Lakota tribal leaders, celebrates the return of the once nearly extinct animal as a symbol of resilience.
Right Whales in Trouble: There are only around 380 right whales left in the North Atlantic. But protections for the species, which are threatened by boats and the fishing industry, may now have to wait until at least 2035.
Parks Takes on Gardens: After a nationwide search, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden found their next leader close to home: Sue Donoghue, who formerly served as NYC parks commissioner and president of Prospect Park Alliance, will take up the mantle as the garden’s president and CEO.
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The dancers showed connectivity and community through movement. Photo: Siena Cohen
The Gowanus Canal has a complicated history. The salt marsh was treated as an industrial dumping ground until it was identified as a superfund site in 2010. Then, as the area became less polluted, residents were displaced to make way for new apartment units (which remain out of reach financially for most New Yorkers).
Throughout the years, different grassroots organizations have advocated to keep the canal clean and affordable. Lynn Neuman, lead choreographer of Brooklyn’s Artichoke Dance Company, has been involved in many of these groups — it’s how she met fellow activist Michael Higgins. The two joined forces to create an immersive tour through Gowanus that merges dance, history, and activism.
Bluedot sent Siena Cohen on the tour, where she learned more about the canal’s past and how New Yorkers are working together to protect its future.
The start of a new school year has a way of inspiring fresh starts well beyond the classroom. A little planning, a few durable essentials, and a focus on buying only what you need can save money, reduce waste, and make the transition into the new season a little easier — packing lunch is one of the easiest ways to cut back on single-use plastics.
Ecozoi’s stainless steel bento boxes ($41.45) keep foods neatly separated with leakproof lids, while reusable snack bags ($12) and cloth napkins ($36) help replace disposable bags and paper products.
Dear Dot,
I’m a renter, so I have little control over carbon emissions from my living situation. But are there things I can do?
– Libby
Dear Libby,
While I don’t know your specific rental situation, it is true that many renters live in high-density housing in mixed-use neighborhoods. If that’s the case, you likely already have a lower carbon footprint than a lot of folks. Luckily for you and the other 44 million rental households in the U.S., there are still plenty of things we can do, even if our landlords aren’t particularly keen on green upgrades. How we heat and cool our homes is the biggest energy drain, and that holds true also for rentals, so let’s start there.
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BLUEDOT LIVING KITCHEN
Photo by Vanessa Seder
This cold noodle salad is refreshing on hot days and ideal for using up odds and ends of raw vegetables so they don’t go to waste. You can use what you have in your pantry to adjust the soy-miso dressing to your liking. Pack the dressing on the side, and this makes the perfect lunch for a picnic in the park!
BROOKLYN WILDLIFE WATCH
Pancake heads for the Atlantic outside the New York Aquarium. Photo: Wildlife Conservation Society
Meet Pancake: an endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle who was rescued last winter in Massachusetts while suffering from cold stunning, a condition like hypothermia that impacts cold-blooded sea turtles. Pancake was rehabilitated for months by the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society in Westhampton before being released, healthy and eating well, into the Atlantic Ocean outside the New York Aquarium last weekend.
"Every Kemp's ridley returned to the ocean is a victory for one of the world's most endangered sea turtle species," said John Calvelli, executive vice president of public affairs for the Wildlife Conservation Society.
The Bluedot Brooklyn newsletter is edited by Ella Spungen. If you have any questions, suggestions, ideas, or want to tell us what you’re doing, email [email protected].
