LDS Earth Stewardship

Sometimes you just kind of fall into trying something and discover a whole niche you’d never heard of before. One thing led to another and now I’m a zipper slider expert!

I’m part of a Rotary group, a group that serves locally and internationally. Every year, we gather lost and found items from schools in our district, have the coats washed, and give them to various organizations like the Road Home and the International Rescue Committee.

Some of these coats and jackets are stained, ripped, or broken in some way, but some of them were thrown away only because the zipper wouldn’t zip up. It felt like such a waste to throw away an otherwise perfectly good coat, so I took them home and started researching how to fix them.

I had thought I’d have to rip out all the stitches of the zipper tape and sew in a new one, but found out a lot of times the tape is fine, it’s just the slider that needs replacing, and you can do this for about $2 or less. Imagine getting a new coat for $2! HUGE deal. This is my third year, and I’ve diverted about 200 coats from the landfill to people who need them.