A swap for the planet

That’s exactly the kind of shift organizers of the clothing swap hope to entourage. Hosted by the Climate Fellows, a graduate student group focused on environmental justice, the swap invited students to drop off clothes they no longer wanted and pick up something new, all free of charge.

“The fast fashion industry is very destructive for the environment. It’s extremely unsustainable, it’s bad for climate change and it also just can be very wasteful. Clothes just go through factories, they get thrown away, they’re not made thoughtfully,” said Emma Corinne, a marine policy graduate student and president of the Climate Fellows. “The industry as a whole can be very damaging for climate change.”

“But a clothing swap is a really cool way to promote reduce, reuse, recycle into the clothing industry,” she added.

For Corinne, it’s about making the connection between personal habits and global impact.

She encouraged students to swap clothes “instead of buying a t-shirt from H&M or whatever – I don’t want to single out a single company – stores where clothes are shipped directly from China, which is also part of the climate change impact that you’re putting tons of material on ships and sending it across the ocean. That’s emissions,” she said. “So, instead of doing that, we’re taking clothes from students at UD and giving them to students at UD. There’s no carbon emissions.”

Gen Z’s thrifting power

“I would attribute it to a couple things. One is just an awareness, and it’s almost an awareness to the point where it’s become a trend,” Corinne said. “People want to get their clothes sustainably because I feel like back in the day maybe that wasn’t seen as the trendy thing to do, whereas now thrifting is all the rage.”

“I think the other thing is they realize that they’re the ones impacted by climate change. They’re younger, they’re going to live through it,” she added. “And if they don’t do something, they realize that those consequences [will] come back to them in the future. And because of that, they have a motivation to practice sustainable shopping.”

That awareness appears to be translating into action. According to a recent Capital One Shopping report, more than 60% of Gen Z prefer to buy secondhand — a shift shaped by both values and value, especially in an era marked by inflation and rising retail prices.

“Obviously, I’m a single person so it’s a small change, but at least it’s something,” Dziemian said. “When you have cool clothing … and then [people] ask where it’s from and you say you thrifted it, then they get inspired to do the same thing.”

“You’re not going into a store and going to be wearing the same thing as everyone else. It’s very unique to your own style,” she added. “You can really get to experiment, which I think is the most fun part of it.”

It’s the subtleties that can make the difference between catching no shad and potentially one worth about $20,000 this week in the Easton-Phillipsburg area.

The 14th annual Bi-State Shad Fishing Contest opened Thursday on the Delaware River and runs through Sunday.

This year’s contest drew 1,157 registrants, up about 50 from last year, organizer Eric Fistler said.

They’re vying for the top cash prize estimated at $20,000 that’s part of the top-10 payout, in addition to three daily prizes for the heaviest American shad. The grand prize has held steady in recent years but is down from $25,000 in 2024, due to organizers having to buy the boat that’s also up for grabs after efforts fell short on getting it donated, Fistler explained.

The new 17-foot boat package with Yamaha jet-drive motor and trailer will be raffled off during Monday’s awards ceremony. All participants who registered by Thursday’s deadline at 8 a.m. are in the running.

Fistler also offers bonus prizes for seniors, veterans and women, plus children in two age groups: 11 and under and 12 to 15.

American shad are anadromous, meaning they hatch into fry in freshwater like the Delaware, live into adulthood in the ocean then return to the river of their origin to spawn. The spawning run up the Delaware is well underway, and Thursday’s anglers were bringing in shad in the neighborhood of 5 pounds to the weigh station at the Phillipsburg boat launch.

Fistler updates the contest’s Facebook page each time the leaderboard changes, so participants in the contest know not to keep shad under a certain weight.

With picture-perfect weather overhead, Thursday’s sunshine pushed the river’s temperature over 60 degrees Fahrenheit, Fistler said. That’s about the point shad will start to spawn, rather than hitting anglers’ lures like they do when the water’s in the 50s, he said.

“The shad fishing slowed down a little bit, I think, because it’s too hot,” Fistler said Thursday afternoon at the weigh station. “Earlier this week, they were catching big numbers of shad. Some of the guys still are, but the majority of them aren’t. It’s slowed down for sure.”

Rain forecast for Saturday could push water temperatures back down, to the benefit of anglers.

“Shad fishing is better when it’s like drizzly overcast — not pouring down rain, but a drizzly day is your best, for me personally,” said Fistler, a lifelong Delaware River fisherman who lives in Williams Township.

Anglers in the Delaware River at Easton-Phillipsburg are also catching smallmouth bass, walleye, trout and a few small striped bass, according to Fistler. He lost a lure rig earlier this week when it was bitten off by what he suspects was a muskellunge.

“They’re huge and they have teeth,” he said of muskies. “The biggest one I caught was 35 and a half pounds.”

For shad, it’s all about picking the right color dart or flutter spoon that’ll pique the fish’s interest. The weigh station is stocked with lures and other gear from Rusty Balls Tackle & Guide Service. Another spot close by to pick up gear is Shad Den Bait and Tackle in Easton.

Once outfitted, anglers zero in on just the right spot to fish.

“Last week, me and my brother were out and we were catching them, but it was kind of slow,” Fistler said. “I said, ‘For the water clarity and the temperature, we should be doing better.’ I said, ‘We’re gonna move.’”

Within moments of the move, they were pulling out four or five at a time.

“We only moved over maybe a boat width, we just moved over a little bit, and moved it out towards the middle, got in the current more, and it was on,” he said.

He recommends looking for an eddy along the edge of a current where the shad might pause for a rest.

“Poor man’s salmon,” angler Tony Glennon quipped Thursday at the weigh station, in recognition of the fight shad will put up.

Scroll through the photos above for a look at Thursday’s opening day of the 2025 Bi-State Shad Fishing Contest. Spectators can find spots to watch the fishing action from Easton’s Scott and Riverside parks or along Union Square in Phillipsburg.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.

Another company has threatened to move its legal headquarters out of Delaware, even after sweeping corporate law changes were made to protect corporate directors.

Eighty percent of all publicly traded companies come to Delaware for its judicial expertise in business dealings and corporate-friendly tax code, but is a mass exodus really upon the state?

Here’s what to know.

Affirm Holdings considers reincorporation

According to GuruFocus, financial technology company Affirm Holdings is reportedly contemplating reincorporating its business from Delaware to either Nevada or Texas.

The company’s CEO, Max Levchin, co-founded PayPal and worked with Elon Musk, whose publicly aired disagreements with Delaware’s Court of Chancery attemped to fuel a movement for corporations to leave Delaware.

In recent months, a number of other companies have expressed interest in moving legal headquarters from Delaware to states like Nevada.

AMC Networks, which owns and operates the AMC cable channel, as well as Madison Square Garden’s Entertainment company cited the increasing franchise tax obligations and uncertainty in judiciary rulings as drivers for reincorporation.

“By re-domesticating the company from Delaware to Nevada, we believe we will be better suited to take advantage of business opportunities and that Nevada law can better provide for our ever-changing business needs and lower our ongoing administrative expenses,” AMC Networks’ proxy statement says.

Other companies like DropBox and Roblox also are in the process of reincorporating to Nevada. Walmart and Meta, which owns Facebook, have reportedly expressed similar desires to leave Delaware, but no progress has been made on their fronts.

What started this pattern?

Delaware’s corporate laws, usually precedented by Delaware Court of Chancery’s rulings, dictate how controlling stockholders or Delaware-incorporated companies can cut deals. The speed and expertise of the court is one of the primary reasons companies choose to incorporate in Delaware in the first place.

“Delaware has been famous for its corporate law and its appeal to companies because you could pretty much always count on it doing a very sensible and balanced thing, even if it wasn’t the thing you wish they would have done,” said Larry Cunningham, , director of the University of Delaware’s Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance. Over the past couple of years, there’s been some debate about if that’s still true.”

The debate in question became inflated after December 2024, when a Delaware Chancery Court judge ruled Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package invalid for the second time. The decision sparked Musk to take to social media advising other businesses not to incorporate in Delaware. The ruling against Musk has since been appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court.

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A few months later, the Delaware Supreme Court issued a decision in a case within Match Group Inc, which essentially stated that certain protocols must be taken before an “interested transaction,” that is one that involves a controlling shareholder with a potential conflict of interest, takes place.

This court decision was viewed by many companies with controlling shareholders as a catalyst of distrust in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, proof that the judiciary was not as reliable as it had long been perceived to be.

Since the Match decision, a number of companies have threatened to reincorporate from Delaware to other states, in a mass exodus that became known as ‘’DExit.”

The DExit scare led legislators and Gov. Matt Meyer to pass Senate Bill 21, essentially meant to reverse the Match decision by protecting directors and controlling stockholders in order to coax businesses to remain in the First State.

Senate Bill 21 was passed nearly unanimously and quickly signed by Meyer in March, but was not without controversy.

Email correspondence made available via Freedom of Information Act Request and a report from CNBC found that representatives for companies like Meta and Elon Musk’s legal team were involved in the bill’s drafting.

Supporters of the bill said the changes are a necessary course correction that will give corporations’ most powerful managers more predictability and consistency as they consider business transactions.

Opponents argued that the bill would hinder the Chancery Court’s ability to rule over conflicts of interest, allowing business leaders to benefit themselves at the expense of pensioners, retirees and ordinary investors.

Is ‘DExit’ a real threat?

Did SB21 fail in its intention to keep corporations in Delaware? The short answer is no, but it may be too soon to tell.

No matter the political and judicial landscape, one pattern has remained the same – companies leave Delaware every year. While exact numbers are hard to track, it’s generally safe to say that companies incorporated in Delaware far exceed companies that don’t.

“No single factor is going to decide what’s best for a company in terms of where to incorporate it,” said Cunningham. “I wouldn’t have expected [SB21] to promptly change any major decisions. It may have played some role, but it could be one in dozens of factors.”

During a Joint Finance Committee Hearing on Feb. 13, Delaware’s Department of State showed that over 80% of IPOs (initial public offerings) are incorporated in Delaware.

According to the presentation, the corporate landscape propped up by Delaware’s Division of Corporations, Courts and General Assembly generated around $2 billion in revenue for the state in 2024 from around 2 million entities incorporated in the state.

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A number of the publicly available proxy documents that spell out reasons for leaving Delaware cite increasing franchise tax obligations in the state.

According to the Delaware Division of Revenue, all corporations incorporated in the state have a maximum tax of $200,000 and “large corporate filers” have a tax capped at $250,000. So, even trillion-dollar-companies like Meta pay a maximum of $250,000 in franchise taxes to Delaware – a price that more companies are citing as too high to stay in Delaware.

In terms of the “judicial uncertainty” referenced by many of the corporations threatening to re-incorporate, Cunningham believes the “drama may be overdone.”

“It’s true that businesspeople value certainty when making decisions,” Cunningham said. “I have not detected the pattern that is being described.”

Molly McVety covers community and environmental issues around Delaware. Contact her at mmcvety@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @mollymcvety.