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Aberdeen’s Repair What You Wear wins £500 Eco Heroes prize

Ros Studd and Elahe Alavi have won the P&J's Eco Heroes 2022 competition and secured themselves £500 for their Repair What You Wear project.
Left to right: Ros Studd, Elahe Alavi, and Press and Journal reporter Kieran Beattie presenting their award.
Image:  Kath Flannery / DC Thomson
Ros Studd and Elahe Alavi have won the P&J's Eco Heroes 2022 competition and secured themselves £500 for their Repair What You Wear project. Left to right: Ros Studd, Elahe Alavi, and Press and Journal reporter Kieran Beattie presenting their award. Image: Kath Flannery / DC Thomson

Our readers have voted for the Aberdeen fast fashion-fighting project Repair What You Wear to win our £500 Eco Heroes grand prize.

Every month for the past 10 months, we have celebrated a fantastic individual or organisation from all across the north and north-east of Scotland who has been doing exceptional things to help the environment.

From a Nairn-based neonatal nurse dedicated to saving bees, to an Aberdeenshire woman who has taught 25,000 kids to cycle, our Press and Journal Eco Heroes project has celebrated the very best of local environmental champions.

Earlier this month, we asked our readers to vote in our shortlist of three Eco Heroes finalists to see who they wanted to win £500 to help further their cause. 

The voting was very tight, and more than 700 votes were cast.

But in the end, the winner with 47% of the vote was Repair What You Wear, a garment-mending team of two Aberdeen ladies who create free videos and content to help people fix their own clothes and reduce fashion’s impact on landfill.

Winning Eco Heroes gives Repair What You Wear ‘hope they can move forward and grow’

Ros Studd, left and Elahe Alavi, right, with their Eco Heroes award in their Repair What You Wear mending room. Image: Kath Flannery/DC Thomson

Ros Studd and Elahe Alavi, who have been running the Repair What You Wear project for the past two years, said they’re delighted our readers voted for them to win our Eco Heroes grand prize.

The duo have racked up more than one million views accumulatively across their variety of videos designed to help anyone with a needle and thread to fix up common rips, tears and defects in clothing.

They hope by helping people to maintain their clothes and prevent it going to waste, they can help in their own way to combat the fashion industry’s significant contributions to climate change.

Ros said she feels the award is validation for their countless hours they have spent working on the Repair What You Wear initiative — all without making a penny.

The two women intend to use the £500 from The Press and Journal to help them establish their organisation as an official Community Interest Company (CIC), and work to help create mending workshops and other clothes-fixing schemes across Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.

Ros and Elahe are constantly working together to figure out new ways to help people fix and maintain their clothing. Image: Kath Flannery/DC Thomson

Ros said: “I’m so proud and pleased because it helps raise the profile of fashion’s impact on the environment.

“We want to become a CIC to give us access to funding and raise the profile of what we do, and show leadership in climate change and cost of living action from here, in Aberdeen.

Elahe said the award “really gives me, personally, hope that we can move forward and grow”.

She explained they will also use the cash to improve their website in order to make it “even more accessible to all, and ensure our resources are really easy to use for everybody who wants to use them”.

‘The fact we were recognised as Eco Heroes really meant something’

Ros and Elahe have been operating Repair What You Wear for free for the past two years. Image: Kath Flannery/DC Thomson

Ros said having Repair What You Wear highlighted in our year-long Eco Heroes campaign helped with her cause, which is about more than simply saving cash on buying new clothes.

She explained: “The fact we were recognised as Eco Heroes really meant something.

“Because a lot of the time we have to explain to people that this is an environmental action, and we mend because we care about the environment.”

Whats next for the Repair What You Wear Eco Heroes?

The pair intend to help set up Repair What You Wear cafe projects in the new year. Image: Kami Thomson/DC Thomson

Elahe added: “We’re keen to help start-up repair cafes and workshops in the north-east.

“We’ve already had a few people get in touch with us after the first article about us, so we’ll be hopefully working with them too.

“We don’t want to run these events ourselves, we want to encourage people across the north-east to set these up themselves.”

Ros said: “I think we can be proud of what we’ve achieved here working for free for two and a half years.”

10 stories over 10 months: A look back at our Eco Heroes 2022 project

We’d like to thank each and every one of the 10 fantastic individuals and organisations we’ve put the spotlight on as part of our Eco Heroes 2022 project.

You can find out more about all 10 of the projects we’ve featured by clicking on these stories below, which feature people from all walks of life, as well as some fascinating videos of their work in action.

And if you know someone you think is an Eco Hero and should be getting their moment in the spotlight in the Press and Journal, why not email us at environmentandtransport@pressandjournal.co.uk with their details, and we could potentially feature them in a future article.

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