Clearing out your wardrobe? Here’s how you can stop good quality clothing from ending up in landfill

• Change by Degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint
• Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com

It’s a Saturday morning and I’m pulling clothes out of my suitcase and hanging them on a rack. Around me are three others attending their own displays. We’re all here for the same purpose – to find a more sustainable way to part with the clothes we no longer need .

Selling my secondhand clothes at rent-a-rack stores is just one approach I took over the past year in my quest to find alternatives to my local overflowing op shop.

Enlarge / The Fairbuds and their replaceable components, including the notably hand-friendly, non-soldered batteries. (credit: Fairphone)

Fairphone has spent years showing us that it could do what major phone manufacturers suggest is impossible: make a modern-looking phone, make it brazenly easy to open up, design it so battery swaps are something you could do on lunch break, and also provide software support for an unbelievable eight to 10 years .

Bluetooth headphones, specifically wireless earbuds, seemed destined to never receive this kind of eco-friendly, ownership-oriented upgrade, in large part because of how small they are. But the Fairbuds have arrived, and Fairphone has made them in its phones' image. They're only available in the EU at the moment, for 149 euro (or roughly $160 USD). Like the Fairphone 4, there's a chance interest could bring them to the US.

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With no more than $10,000, a ‘junk heap’ was made over using salvaged cedar panels, secondhand doors and insulation made from wheat straw

• Change by Degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint
• Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com

Plant stylist Emma Sadie Thomson looked every day at the unused shed outside the entrance to the home where she lived with her partner and their two young daughters in the Adelaide Hills. Could it be a better place to work than the kitchen table, where her children and housework provided constant distractions?

“It was just a junk heap,” says Thomson. “We never used it. I wanted somewhere to go, even if it’s taking 20 steps, rather than sitting on the kitchen table.” She decided to convert the shed into a studio. Aiming to spend no more than $10,000, Thomson opted for recycled materials for the windows, door, and wood exterior panelling.

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Nine out of ten producers and sellers do not fulfil their legal duty to help consumers dispose of e-cigarettes, study shows

A quarter of a billion disposable vapes could be dumped before a ban comes in next year as most retailers are not fulfilling their legal duty to help consumers recycle them, according to new research.

The not-for-profit organisation Material Focus, which conducted the research, found that more than nine out of 10 of vape producers and retailers seem not to provide or pay for the return and recycling of single-use e-cigarettes.

High street brands such as Sainsbury’s, WH Smith, Boots and convenience stores were among the worst offenders, providing little or zero recycling drop-off points, according to Material Focus.

The not-for-profit went into more than 700 retail stores looking for drop-off-points or asking if they could get their vape recycled, after seeing the products advertised for sale.

East Yorkshire artist Mandy Barker has found a way to make us look again at pollution – cataloguing fibres from fast fashion in the style of a Victorian book about British algae

When Mandy Barker stumbled upon a fragment of colour in a rock pool while walking near Spurn Point, East Yorkshire, in 2012, she was bewitched. “I thought it was a piece of seaweed with lovely colours on it – greeny-browny – but when I went to pick it out, I saw that it was actually a strip of clothing material,” she says.

Growing up on the Yorkshire coast, Barker had become used to the coastline she once walked to collect driftwood shells changing around her. “Over the years I saw TVs, fridge freezers and computers washing up on the beach,” she said. “Fishers there told me they could see trawlers out at sea visibly dumping waste into the ocean. People would pay these trawlermen to take their rubbish out and dump it. And the fish were getting tangled up in it.”

The competition was intense. At one point, the members of another team came over to us and tried to pick rubbish out of our bag

SpoGomi is a sport involving litter-picking by teams of three. You’re given an area of roughly 1.5 sq km (0.6 sq miles), and have to collect as much litter as possible within an hour or so, with some items awarded more points than others. Once you’ve collected your litter, you go to the sorting area and have another 20 minutes to sort it into recycling categories. The litter is then weighed. The team with the most points wins.

SpoGomi was invented in Japan in 2008. The name is a combination of “sport” and the Japanese word for rubbish, “ gomi ”. The first SpoGomi world cup didn’t take place until last year. My brother Stephen stumbled across SpoGomi in São Paulo, where he lives. I heard about the sport from him in May last year. The UK SpoGomi competition was scheduled for August, with the world cup in Tokyo in November. I had just a few months to form my team. Initially we were drawn to taking part because of the prize of a trip to Japan.

La Joyita prison was notorious for its squalor but a recycling scheme has helped rehabilitate inmates and eased gang fights

La Joyita prison, just outside Panama City, was notorious for being filthy, overcrowded and dangerous. It was known as the “stomach of the beast” for those confined within its walls. “We literally lived on top of rubbish,” says Franklin Ayón.

“It was everywhere – in the corners, in the corridors,” says Ayón, who was imprisoned for drug trafficking in 2012. “We had to sit with a towel over our head to eat, just so the flies wouldn’t land on the food.”

Derided by the architectural establishment, Marcel Raymaekers used salvaged materials from ships, planes and slaughterhouses – to create riotous buildings that made people rethink their lives

Shimmering skylights bulge from the pitched roof of a house in rural Belgium, like an army of slugs slithering up the terracotta tiles. It turns out that these bulbous glass cupolas once served as the cockpits of Lockheed fighter jets, but they’re now bringing light into this astonishing, pyramid-shaped home, illuminating an interior made of tarred timber reclaimed from old boats and a sculptural hearth made from salvaged bricks.

In a suburb nearby, a huge ornate stone bay window, this time salvaged from a Brussels townhouse, dangles from the facade of an angular modern house like an oversized trophy. Porthole windows flank an arched stone entrance, leading to an interior where aged pine beams fan out across the ceiling, above a black fireplace made of steel from a ship. Pointed arch doorways, salvaged from a church, lead to further sumptuous chambers, all stuffed with objets trouvés .

City’s waffling on food scrap programs not only harms environment but also hinders participation in waste management schemes

Steven Roig was excited to land a job trucking and processing compost in May of last year. After graduating from a jobs training program called Green City Force , he had spent much of his adult life making New York City greener through his work on green roofs, urban agriculture and landscaping. He especially loved working in compost, being part of the team at Big Reuse that processed 10,000lbs of food scraps and yard waste from Brooklyn and Queens every week, helping the organic waste on its journey back to becoming healthy soil.

“It’s a lot of hard work, but I enjoyed collecting the scraps, processing them and seeing them go through all the different cycles,” he said.