Watch: Derry school St Cecilia's College reaches the finals of Young Environmentalist Awards in Dublin

The idea of St Cecilia’s swap shop is to reduce the waste of textiles, clothes, shoes and accessories.

It works on a no money exchange basis. Instead students are encouraged to bring in clothes and swap with other students, reducing waste going to landfills.

Every term the school sets the shop up and has been successful in the past.

In the swap shop students came in during lunch and browsed the clothes, picking items out for themselves and items for friends and family. Some of the items in the swap shop still had the retail tags on them.

Leading the environmentalist group is geography teacher Ms. Rainey, and the Journal spoke with her about her club.

Explaining what her club is all about she said “the environmental group is all about recycling our plastic and paper but then we decided to enter a competition and reduce textile waste as well.”

“Every week they collect the recyclable materials from the bins in each classroom. We could have 40 to 50 bags per week of waste that would otherwise go to landfill. By handpicking out the recyclable waste we have reduced so much going to landfill.”

Talking on the swap shop she explained that the students love it and they also want to reduce the stigma around wearing second hand clothes, telling the Journal that they want to rephrase it by calling them “preloved fashion or sustainable fashion.”

Explaining the success of the previous swap shops, Ms. Rainey said: “The first swap shop was on December 6, 2023 and the group never expected it to be such a success! 277 items were swapped. That’s 277 less items going to landfill.”

Ms. Rainey told the journey of how the environmental club made its way to the finals of the Young Environmentalist Awards. She explained: “There’s different categories of the young environmentalist awards and our category has been to reduce waste. Other schools might have been trying to reduce plastic waste. Our focus is on textile waste.”

Continuing, she said: “We did a presentation for the semi finals like dragon’s den, the girls had to pitch their idea to say basically we think every school should have swap shops. Terminally for Halloween costumes, Christmas jumpers, uniforms in particular, there are so many uniforms that are pristine and people are getting rid of them, you might as well swap it. The judges loved it and we’ve gotten through to the final in the Royal Dublin Convention Centre, as a result we are hoping that we will win.”

Finally Ms. Rainey spoke of her pride in her students, saying: “I am so proud, a lot of people don’t see the work they do behind the scenes, every single Wednesday for an hour after school they’d come in and literally roll their sleeves up and and go through rubbish bins, ensuring that it was only recyclable materials and other people don’t see that hard work but they are so dedicated.”