For the past 24 years, Bernice Brown has spent a few hours every week carefully salvaging buttons from strips of cloth that have been cut away from donated clothes too ragged to salvage.
It isn’t an easy operation; each button must be inspected to be sure it’s not faded, cracked or broken, then carefully cut free of the fabric, threads plucked away, all before being pinned with the other buttons to a small bristol board card.
Last week, Brown put together another card of five buttons, making it her 6,785th card completed in her volunteer labour at Superfluity, a second-hand thrift store located beside Sears on Main Street in Stettler.
Her friend, Elva Regan, also used to be a “button lady” too, though gave that up a few years ago without completing nearly as many cards of buttons as the dedicated Brown. Both have been with Superfluity since it started
“This saves items from the landfill,” Brown said. “It helps people with good things (that other people would throw out). Few places sell buttons nowadays.”
The button racks at Superfluity show just how quickly Brown’s labours are snapped up by buyers: there are less than 30 cards of buttons on the rack while she speaks.
When people donate clothing to Superfluity, volunteers sort the clothes into different groups – men, women, children, babies, and rags. The rag clothing is made from items that are too worn or damaged for resale, and the volunteers bag these items up and send them off – but not before cutting off the strips of cloth where shirts button at the cuff and down the front. Those strips go into a bag, which then makes its way to Brown.
She said she’s always got a bag on the go.
Dorothy Anderson has worked with Superfluity for years, too, and said that Superfluity does more than raise money for local charities – although with its volunteer-only staff, it does that, too.
Anderson estimates Superfluity receives about 30 bags or boxes of items a day, and that rounded out, each donation weighs about 20 pounds. With the store open six days a week, throughout the year she estimates that the location diverts about 187,200 pounds of clothes, furnishings, games, books, and other miscellaneous items – including buttons – from the local landfill sites.
That’s roughly the same weight as a blue whale, and over the years, Anderson believes the store has kept more than 90 tonnes of items from the landfill.
Without the volunteers who run the store, sort the items, salvage the buttons and other saveable items, Anderson said Superfluity wouldn’t be able to help the community like it does.
Clothing that doesn’t sell after a certain amount of time, or is overflow, makes its way to other communities like Red Deer, where they go to second-hand stores or shelters to help the people living there.