New Orleans, the city with one of the best consolidated identities in all of United States, is most renowned for its festivities. Its creole heritage, jazz music, and Mardi Gras celebrations are much sought-after tourist attractions.

Located on the path of the high-traffic Mississippi River trade route, New Orleans has been long dealing with a trash problem. Although aggravated by Hurricane Ida in August 2021 that knocked power out and left behind wreckage from the storms and flooding, it is widely accepted that New Orleans has long suffered from waste production in a disproportionate amount to labor available to clean it up, resulting in frequent missed trash pickups.

The labor shortage was further exacerbated through a nationwide lack of sanitation workers and drivers after the pandemic hit the states, and with Hurricane Ida compounding the situation in New Orleans, residents have suffered weeks on end from delayed garbage pick-ups, the rotting trash sites becoming breeding grounds for germs and diseases since summer of 2021.

In the same way the city celebrates its heritage, citizens of New Orleans took to the streets in late 2021 to protest the unsanitary conditions and bulks of trash left unchecked in a Mardi Gras-style ‘Trash Parade’, which featured people making their way to the City Hall dressed in costumes fashioned from garbage bags and trash cans.

As the mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell deemed the situation to have reached the status of a crisis, tweeting “No getting around it: The situation stinks!” It was estimated that the city would have to deal with 5 times the workload with only 25% of available workforce.
Fortunately, after more than a century of annual Mardi Gras celebrations and mass cleaning up of garbage left behind in their wake, the mayor and her administration were more than prepared to tackle the issue utilizing the usual yearly strategy of mass trash picking-up that follow after a festival. Multiple city-wide departments, including sanitation workers, truck drivers and the police,were mobilized into transferring solid waste to landfills using heavy equipment such as dump trucks, front-end loaders, and more on a large-scale.
The project, named as Operation Mardi Gras, remained however only a temporary solution. With curbside recycling having been put on hold to make room for solid waste collection, New Orleans based luxury consignment store Swap Boutique launched several initiatives during the first few weeks of early 2022 to help the city-wide efforts of pushing for waste reduction.

As the first of many actions taken, Swap Boutique circulated advertisements all around Louisiana calling for consignors to drop by with products from luxury brands that follow sustainable fashion strategies. One such name is hallmark fashion house Gucci, that practices ethical environmental impact policies and supply chain transparency. Swap Boutique encouraged its clients to resell garments made from sustainable fabrics and material including polyamide, vegan synthetic fabric ECONYL, natural fabrics organic cotton, linen and bamboo, and also metals like recycled steel.

With the consignment industry being a sustainable market by nature, in hopes to attract environmentally-conscious prospective clients , Swap Boutique placed heavy emphasis on the recyclability model of consignment in their promotional material. To further provide an incentive for people to consign their designer items, the boutique began to offer higher commission rates on different categories of luxury apparel on and off so clients are able to earn the most they can. Currently, the offer has been applied to designer handbags.
Swap Boutique is also gearing up for the replacement of a good portion of their existing equipment and inventory with more eco-friendly, biodegradable products. Examples include hangers made from lightweight wood and bamboo in addition to recycled packaging constitutingcardboard and other material for the shipping of clothes across Louisiana.
“We think fast-fashion is harmful in more ways than one. In knowing that the fashion industry churns out more carbon emissions than international flights and maritime shipping do combined, things are really put into perspective for us. The conception of our boutique happened on the very principle of sustainability, because that’s what consignment is all about, recycling clothing that would otherwise be discarded and made to occupy landfills. This is why we’re always trying to incorporate eco-friendly policies and initiatives into our services,” a representative of Swap Boutique comments.

As trends come and go, the ever-surging and continuous demand for in-vogue styles of clothing made from cheap, affordable materials contributes to a whopping 10% of the entirety of the worldwide carbon footprint annually. The circular economy model followed by consignment stores like Swap Boutique stands in direct opposition to fast-fashion. It helps cut down on pollution and textile waste through reuse of existing clothing. This results in the decreased need of more cloth manufacturing, which ultimately cuts down on the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions produced by industrial processes.

Swap Boutique, which is an eco-friendly business by design, hopes to play a central role in curbing New Orleans’ pollution problem by being one of the leading contributors of its home city and state’s recycling and waste management efforts, in light of the wreckage left behind by Hurricane Ida and the ongoing sanitation workforce shortage created by COVID-19 restrictions.

About Swap Boutique
Swap Boutique is a designer consignment store primarily based in New Orleans, with more outlets in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The boutique operates on the principles of sustainable fashion and provides clients with a platform to consign and purchase pre-owned luxury fashion at discounted prices, thus contributing to the recycling of intact designer apparel that would’ve otherwise been disposed of.
Swap Boutique maintains an inventory of handbags, footwear, jackets and more from some of the world’s leading luxury fashion labels, including but not limited to Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Chanel.