School uniform is compulsory in the country where children wear white shirts.
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To allow children from underprivileged backgrounds to have the white shirt required at school, an organization had the idea of recovering linen from a chain of prestigious hotels to give it a second life.
Before creating her NGO Restore SA, Danolene Johannesen provided free shirts and shoes to South African children whose families could not afford to buy new clothes for school. The operation required funds which were not always easy to find. And then she thought of recycling by collaborating with a chain of large hotels which regularly renew their stocks of sheets to satisfy demanding customers.
The project, launched in 2019 in Cape Town, has already dressed thousands of children. The sheet of a large double bed alone allows the making of five shirts with very good quality cotton.
The Restore SA project has also enabled the establishment of a permanent workshop which employs South African seamstresses, as stated in an article on the IOL website. An initiative hailed in a country where the unemployment rate exceeds 35%.
In the end, everyone benefits from this very simple operation. Students have impeccable shirts made on site at a lower cost and recycling in the service of underprivileged children and their education brings a rewarding image to hotels that show their commitment to sustainable development.