Breast Cancer Awareness Month | Bin your Bra with ITV's Lorraine Kelly

October is breast cancer awareness month and a month we really look forward to.

With supporters holding fundraising events of all sizes up and down the country it’s a great time to be involved.

This year has been a little different; you may have seen the Bin Your Bra campaign launched on ITV as part of the Lorraine show, which has taken bra recycling to a whole new level.

Broadcast every weekday morning from 8:30 – 9:25 the Bin Your Bra campaign was launched this Tuesday 1st October with a live link to the House of Fraser flagship store on Oxford Street. The campaign is being fronted by the gorgeous Michelle Heaton, herself a breast cancer survivor.

Staff and supporters from House of Fraser and the University of Westminster 

A whole host of celebrities have joined in, from Michelle Heaton, Dawn O’Porter, to  Barbara Windsor, the cast of Coronation Street, pop star Anastasia and many more!

Michelle Heaton (photo by Matt Frost)

But it’s not just about raising funds, it’s about awareness too and on Tuesday 2nd October Dr Hilary demonstrated to the audience how to check your own breasts live on camera, explaining not just how, but why it’s so important. Simply amazing.

The response has been amazing! Our volunteers have been have inundated with requests for bra banks and the postman looks like he’s going to need a bigger van with the sheer volume viewers of Lorraine have already started to send in!  I’ll post an update in the next couple of days with the latest news.

In the meanwhile, here are a couple of links giving a flavour of what’s going on.

http://www.itv.com/lorraine/health/bin-your-bra/

http://www.againstbreastcancer.org.uk/news/charity-news/942/bin-your-bra-with-lorraine-kelly/

Tags: Bra bank campaign, Bra Banks, #binyourbra, ITV Lorraine, House of Fraser, Michelle Heaton, Lorraine Kelly, Kate Garraway, Sharon Osbourne, Kelly Osbourne, Dawn O'Porter, Rachel Stevens, Barbara WIndsor, Carol McGiffin, Honor Blackman, Sally Dynevor, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Jennie McAlpine, Alison King, Natalie Gumede, Tricia Penrose, Aggie MacKenzie, Maureen Lipman, Petula Clark, Linda Barker, Twiggy

1st Supporter Story - Hayley's trip to Africa

We have many supporters that do a wonderful job in raising vital funds for our research into breast cancer, and every now and then we hear an amazing story of one of our supporters who goes the extra mile to help us, and in this case quite literally!

Hayley O'Shea and her bras for the bra scheme

Hayley O'Shea is a woman from HR Services in Cardiff who contacted us to request one of our bra banks to collect her and her friends old bras!

Nothing different we thought when we received a phone call from her!

However Hayley's story was a little different to the last person who ordered a bra bank, as she explained that she been inspired to get involved in our bra bank scheme after she saw it in action during a safari holiday in Africa.

She said: 'While on safari in Kenya, I was amazed to discover women of the Masai Mara tribes wearing bras under their traditional colourful wraps. I was intrigued and discovered an initiative to provide African women with second hand, affordable bras to assist women's breast health. The donation to Against Breast Cancer' is made by their recycling partner, it's based on the weight of bras collected - so more bras means more funds. For every tonne of textiles collected, Against Breast Cancer will receive £1,000 to help fund their research into treatment for breast cancer. The bras are then shipped out to west Africa and sold at village markets helping small businesses in Africa which in turn prevents valuable textiles going to landfill here in the UK.'

Contact Details:

If you'd like to order a bra bank then please contact our recycling manager Emma 
on 01235 534211 or emma@againstbreastcancer.org.uk

BCR Textiles partnership - Friday 16th August

Our partner company for the bra banks are BCR Global Textiles. 
They are a family run organisation which specialize in the re-use and recycling of textiles. 

Textile recycling is the process in which unwanted clothes, shoes and textiles are collected and sorted for re-use. People are encouraged to put wearable clothes, shoes and other textiles into plastic bags and take them to one of our textile banks. 

Re-usable textiles and shoes are then sorted and sent abroad to provide clothing for people who don't have access to or are unable to afford new clothing items.

Bra banks

We have been working together with BCR since the launch of our bra bank campaign in 2010, and they have been very supportive of the campaign, getting involved from day 1!

They supply us with the bra banks and also collect your bra banks when they are full.

To explain more, here's a great YouTube video: What Happens To Recycled Bras

Any bras that are beyond redemption will be dismantled and disposed of properly. 
Also, did you know that the Textile recycling process saves 7.8 million tonnes of C02 emissions every year! 
That’s done by collecting, reusing and recycling thousands and thousands of textiles that they receive from you, the general public.

Bras, banks and breast cancer - Friday 9th August

In 2010 Against Breast Cancer began a campaign to raise funds by recycling our supporters old and ill-fitting bras into small pink portable bra banks. We had no idea then that the idea would prove as popular as it has become.

What started with the support of a few independent lingerie retailers has blossomed into a fundraising phenomenon that in a little over two years has generated over £10,000 for the Against Breast Cancer Research Unit at University of Westminster, bit has kept tonnes of textiles from going to landfill and, of course, provided women in Africa with underwear that remains too expensive to manufacture locally.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK. Every year almost 46,000 women are diagnosed, it claims around 12,000 lives and rates of incidence are rising. Thankfully survival rates are improving too. Advances resulting from scientific research, means that two thirds of women diagnosed with breast cancer will now survive their disease beyond 20 years.

The researchers at the Against Breast Cancer unit are focused on secondary spread breast cancer, improving survival rates through earlier detection. Their diet and lifestyle study involves of over 3000 breast cancer patients across the UK in a 5 year study across 56 NHS hospitals. It is the largest study of its kind and hopes to establish how diet, lifestyle and complementary treatments affect the spread of breast cancer. 

Continuing this research is expensive, we receive no government funding and so must raise the funds we need ourselves. 

We are so grateful to our supporters who, along with their old bras and our little bra branks have risen to the challenge and this blog hopes to tell a little of this on-going story that is helping us move ever closer to our ultimate goal: a future free from breast cancer.

If you would like to order your own bra bank, please contact our community fundraiser Alison on 01235 534211 or email her at; alison@againstbreastcancer.org.uk

For more information on the work we do, please visit our website at http://www.againstbreastcancer.org.uk/

One of our bra banks