Textile Recovery Centre
Providing low-cost resources for Brisbane’s maker community
Adding value to textile waste
Being resourceful and crafty has always involved re-using, unpicking, upcycling and altering, with skills passed down across generations and our volunteers intuitively have this resourcefulness.
When The Nest Community was founded in 2014, we used donated and reclaimed textile resources to offer low cost craft workshops. But donations of resources kept growing and eventually we established a social enterprise, The Nest Haberdashery, to provide low-cost resources to Brisbane’s maker community.
Needing to expand our operations to meet demand, we moved to Brendale in September 2023 and opened our Textile Recovery Centre, with The Nest Haberdashery as the retail outlet.
Each week, we receive around 5000 litres of textile-based donations plus equipment like sewing machines, knitting machines, overlockers, spinning wheels, tapestry frames, mannequins and more. These donations, while always gratefully received, come to us in an unsorted and random condition. They need to be unpacked, sorted, assessed and repackaged before being sold.
To say that this work of sorting is transformative is an understatement. If our Textile Recovery Centre didn’t exist, it’s likely that most of our donations would end up in landfill. Not only does that impact the environment but it also means a cost and loss to the community.
There are many ways textiles can be reclaimed but The Nest Community has pioneered a unique methodology that’s based on the idea that ‘People and resources are equally valued’. This is where our talented volunteers come in. Their brilliance in sorting is due to their expertise and knowledge of textiles, strong work ethic and commitment to our cause. The work of our volunteers is priceless – literally creating value from an undervalued resource.
To operate, we require a weekly roster of around 80 volunteers contributing a total of 400 hours to process and repackage donations.
In comparison to clothing thrift stores where less than 15% of donations get resold, we are proud to say that over 60% of our donations are resold and put back into circulation.
