Waterford mayor encourages people to 'reuse' this October

Waterford's mayor is promoting sustainability ahead of a national reuse awareness campaign taking place throughout October.  

Councillor John O'Leary has launched Reuse Month 2022 at Waterford's Central Library to encourage people to move beyond the idea of "reduce, reuse, recycle" and towards a focus on preventing waste in the first place. 

Reuse is about valuing our stuff by repairing and reusing for as long and as often as possible to avoid the need to extract raw materials and make new stuff. 

National Reuse Month’s aim is to provide the skills and tools to reuse more items every day. 

A host of events are taking place throughout the city and wider county during October to encourage waste prevention, including a clothes swap event and a repair demonstration. 

The clothes swap event takes place on October 19 in the Central Library from 5.30pm, with people encouraged to bring up to five pieces of clean adult clothing to swap for the same number of items. 

Clothes can be dropped off at the library between 11am and 5.30pm on the day. There will also be a clothing repair demonstration on the night, along with the launch of a ‘toolkit’ for swap events to encourage reuse and repair. 

The repair demonstration - which will teach people how to repair furniture, bikes, textiles and washing machines - will take place on October 22 at the Rediscovery Centre at the Coastguard Cultural Centre in Tramore at 11.30am. 

Experts will be on hand to help with any questions that you have and while the repair experts won’t be able to undertake any specific repairs on your items, please feel free to bring along photographs and they will happily chat to you about the repair. 

Waste prevention workshops will be held on various dates in library branches, the focus of which is making a reusable food wrap that provides a natural alternative to plastic wraps and to provide a forum to discuss reuse, composting and recycling as the wraps are being made.

On October 28 there will be a Sustainable Living Tips workshop in Lismore Library about Greener Gardening, Greener Cleaning, composting, food waste prevention and general waste prevention tips.