Month: October 2023

Firstly a quick intro into my personal background, experience and values.

I worked in the fashion industry in production management and manufacturing for over 25 years and I quit the industry two years ago as I felt I had by then contributed enough to the problem of pollution via fashion products. In my career, I developed a deep passion for circularity and wanted to contribute to developing recycling systems for textiles at the end of the (first) consumer/ use stage of a fashion product. I still pursue these topics as my special interest at LCF while teaching as a specialist lecturer for production and product development. I tend to develop my content through the lens of circularity in fashion, considering global raw material shortages and the environmental impact of the manufacturing stage of fashion products.

I have been running classes on sustainable growth in fashion for several years on my course. I have spoken about several problems including but not exhaustive:

• Circular supply chains
  • Upcycling – refashioning products into different products
  • Reusing – rental, sharing and resale
  • Repairing – mending workshops to retain the value of the textile product
  • Recycling – using secondary textiles as raw material

• Environmental footprint legislation – national and international
  • Carbon emissions in the fashion supply chains
  • Hazardous and banned substances

• Disruptive business models
  • Digitally driven made-to-order models – mass customisation
  • Pre-order models
  • Localised supply chains – onshoring and nearshoring

My students over the past three years have had considerable input in the above topics but I have felt that when they designed their own projects, especially their Master projects which are independently designed they have not applied this knowledge to the depth that I had hoped.

I now wanted to try taking the students to the SATCol Processing Centre which is the commercial arm of the Salvation Army to witness the impact of textile waste in person and to discuss the origins of the issue (overproduction, overconsumption, poor quality) and suggest solutions that can be implemented at all levels of the product lifecycle.

SATCol are investing in state-of-the-art technology to sort textiles by fibre content and colour (dark and light colours initially). SATCol then channel donated textiles to retain value within the lifecycle by selling on, exporting to global destinations of need (vetted and audited) and preparing to recycle.

Please see further information here and a short video clip of the technology here.

Working with partners and through various reuse and recycling schemes SATCol aim to lessen landfilled textiles by extending the useful life of products and recycling the items not suitable for resale.

The process includes a two-step internal sorting system as illustrated below:

The main aim of sorting textiles is to remain in the green areas and retain the reuse and recyclability of textiles. The excursion day will circle around problem presentation and solution finding and suggesting and understanding the changes that can be implemented throughout the product journey to minimise impact at the end of the first user.

By showing the students to only produce garments that eventually will end up in the green areas I was hoping to make a good start to the decision-making on materials used to form a collection from design through to production.

The below experience map will illustrate the planned activities with a possible plan to take the ARP forward into a repeatable project:

One of the successes of this ARP was that it inspired me to think about making it repeatable and a useful activity that I can take across the college in a scaled-down version. It would be possible to remove some of the clutter of organising the day, coach, lunct etc working with external partners.

• Ethics form
  • CONSIDER PHYSICAL IMPACTS OF THE EXCURSION- PLAN FOR ACCESSIBILITY
  • CONSIDER PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT ON STUDENTS
  • CONSIDER RESEARCH ETHICS
  • SUBMITTED 10 NOV VIA TURNITIN – SIGNED OFF LINDSEY JORDAN

• Draft activity plan/brief
  • DIVIDE GROUPS INTO TWO TO SWAP AROUND DURING THE DAY

• BOOK COACH AND DEVELOP ITINERARY
• Date: Tuesday 14th November  Number of people: 40 passengers

Pick-up: 8:00 am – Both groups – London College of Fashion – Carpenter’s Road, Stratford, London E20 2AR

Stop 1 – 10.00 am – Group 1 drop off – Kettering reprocessing centre  NN14 1UD

Stop 2 – 10.30 am – Group 2 drop off: – Wollaston corporate donations centre, NN29 7RG

Stop 3 – 12.30 pm – 1 pm – Group 2 transfer – Wollaston corporate donations centre NN29 7RG transfer to Kettering reprocessing centre  NN14 1UD

– 1 pm – 1.30 pm – Group 1 transfer – Kettering reprocessing centre  NN14 1UD to Wollaston Corporate Donations Centre, NN29 7RG

Stop 4  – Group 1 – 3.30 pm – 4pm Group 1 from Wollaston Corporate Donations Centre, NN29 7RG to Kettering reprocessing centre  NN14 1UD

-Group 2 pick up – 4.00pm – Pick-up Kettering reprocessing centre  NN14 1UD

Return – 4.00pm – Both groups – Return to London College of Fashion – Carpenter’s Road, Stratford, London E20 2AR

Arrival – 18:00/ 18.30pm – Both Groups – London College of Fashion – Carpenter’s Road, Stratford, London E20 2AR

• MAKE LUNCH ARRANGEMENTS BOTH GROUPS
  • Sandwiches at SATCol boardroom – SATCol to organise locally

• DEVISE SORTING ACTIVITY WITH SATCOL TEAM (See Appendix 1)

• Run activity
  • TOUR OF FACILITY
    • Collection
    • Unloading
    • Removal of disrupters (non-textile donated products)
    • Presort – wearable/ unwearable textiles
  • SORTING ACTIVITY
    • Recyclable textiles
    • Non-recyclable textiles
      • Discussion:
      • Channels for recyclable textiles
      • Channels for non-recyclable textiles
      • Avoiding use of non-recyclable textiles/ Alternatives in design/ product development
  • CIRCULARITY DISCUSSION at Woolaston Donation Centre

• Capture outputs – Data collection
  • QUESTIONNAIRES
    • BEFORE QUESTIONAIRE – Establishing knowledge and awareness
    • AFTER QUESTIONAIRE – Understanding improved knowledge
  • OBSERVATIONS
    • Association with topic

• Reflect on session- Data analysis
  • PRACTICAL ELEMENT
  • CLASS DYNAMIC DURING VISIT
  • STUDENT/ TEACHER RELATIONSHIPS

• Debrief with Observers
  • On coach journey home
  • Pizza and beer post-trip

• Get feedback
  • FEEDBACK RECEIVED – EVA FELD
  • FEEDBACK REQUESTED ELLA SHARP, SEAN-HENRY FITZSIMMONS, JACKIE ANDREWS-UDALL, YOSANA LEAL

• Debrief with students
  • Short session on campus to:
    • Debrief – check on understanding
    • Deliver more academic content to round of content
  • Q&A – testing -interest and engagement

• Plan next steps
  • OBSERVE ON-GOING ENGAGEMENT WITH LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT
  • Bring workshop in-house at East Bank with mobile devices and

• Presentation slides
  • VISUAL NOT TEXT HEAVY

TOPIC ETHICS

The Ethics of my action research was personally a challenging aspect for me to consider and this is linked closely to the topic I teach and linked to the student’s expectations of my institution and their future professions in the fashion industry.

I teach at the School of Design and Technology at the London College of Fashion on the Masters in Innovative Fashion Production. I teach four units on this course including the supervision of the Master projects. Innovation is a major part of the content of this course and for young people signing up for it, our students often expect ich knowledge and skills in new technology, and digital developments to produce more clothes cheaper and with better profit margins. There is a notion of bigger, better, faster and more. Innovation rarely ever means saving resources and reducing speed out of the supply chain for the recruitees. Having to raise sustainable production as a direction in fashion manufacturing has been challenging as our students often come from overseas and spend their parents’ life savings on achieving their dreams which I am reluctant to crush. I have made the diagram below to better explain the conundrum.

Considering the above and in planning my visit to the SATCol Reprocessing Centre I was aware that some of the students might have preferred to go into one of London’s department stores to examine the needs of product development for the luxury end of the industry or they would have liked to go to a factory that produces luxury clothing in this country and perhaps not an end-of-life waste management facility for textiles.

The question to myself was whether I have the right to take the students to this facility where the students might be faced with a problem they are unwilling to acknowledge. After all the interest in stopping waste in the fashion industry is my own and perhaps not the students’. The literature indicated that I was holding on to old colonial beliefs and recognising an unwillingness to adapt to change. Rousell (2016) explains that even as ‘we find ourselves already in the midst of everyday social and ecological catastrophes, existential risks and uncertain futures’ (Rousell, 2016, p. 138), we remain invested in the continuity of a modern-colonial system that is both modern higher education’s condition of possibility and the root cause of climate change.

Packed with this understanding I went to examine this question deeper and referred back to the Learning Outcomes of the unit that I teach on and found LO4 was in line with my plan as it outlines the construction of comprehensive undertanding of the environmental and social implications of fashion production.

I have further taken into consideration the Climate Action Plan of UAL which is a disappointingly short document but still gave me the mandate to go ahead with my action research project and expose my students to the content I knew they would find.

The overall strategy of all activities at UAL is underpinned by Sustainability and Social Justice and frameworks for this are being implemented via the Climate Change Advocates at LCF.

At this point, I felt grateful and lucky to be able to invest this time into exploring my own interests and how it aligns with the values of my place of work. This was grounding and reassuring and secured my position on the topic.

The other concern I foresaw was that the topic was very serious and overwhelmingly big and global. I was aware that I am presenting the student with an enourmous problem that it was impossible to come away from in the same way as Climate Change. All of this in an industry that they wanted to become a part of and strive. Initiallly I had the intenion of sharing solutions to the problem on the day but as time was very tightly packed I put on a Debrief Workshop two days after the visit to catch this and come away with a proactive approach to the potential overwhelm.

RESEARCH ETHICS

Please see the link to the Ethics form as an introduction to the Ethics of my Action Research Project: Ethics form Satcol visit

The Ethics form was signed off on the first submission and I was able to proceed with the Action Research as outlined.

According to the University of the Arts London Code of Practice on Research Ethics, I understood that it was my care of duty to ensure.

It was made clear to all participants that taking part in the research was the right to withdraw from the research at any point and this would not affect the learning of the external visit or the content delivery for the day.

Consent to the visit was achieved verbally and students were given the right to withdraw at any time of the research verbally or via email. The right to withdraw is and consent run alongside each other. Withdrawal from the research did not mean they could not take part in the visit.

The survey was specifically voluntary and the collection of the questionnaires was carried out casually and without exerting pressure on the participants.

Please see further in the Appendix 7 the UAL General Risk Assessment Form that addressed all physical risks of the visit. Due to the nature of the products the students needed to handle worn textiles which could possibly be contaminated. The SATCol health and safety rules were observed on site.

Questionaires

I decided to use a two-fold system of before and after questionnaires as I was curious to really understand the learning that can be achieved on an extensive day full of activities and being able to measure this. Questionnaires are ideal vehicles for measuring (Floyd J. and Fowler 2009) which presented ideal as I wanted to be able to measure the effect of the action research even if the even if the answers I had collected might have been subjective.

I understand data well when it is measurable and comparable and although the answers depend very much on the individual and are subjective there is some consistency as I have linked the surveys through personal but anonymous identifiers.

When designing questions for a survey I was looking to measure, not a conversational inquiry. Floyd and Fowler state that in general, an answer given to a survey question is of no intrinsic interest but that the answer is valuable to the extent that it can be shown to have a predictable relationship to facts or subjective states of interest. They further recommend that good questions maximize the relationship between the answers recorded and what the researcher is trying to measure. This is when I decided to link and countercheck the knowledge via the questions.

I was lucky to have a captive audience of a fairly large group of students for data collection as we had to take two 2-hour coach rides which meant there was time for the students to take a few minutes to fill in a survey.

The questionnaires intended to measure the following

• Attitude to topic
• Knowledge/ Understanding of topic (self-evaluation)
• Knowledge/ Understanding of topic (knowledge testing questions)

Questionnaire to be filled before SATCOL facility visit

Questionnaire to be filled after SATCOL facility visit

Each question was assigned a function and linked to a question in the second survey.

I was fairly certain of a good result in improved understanding but wanted ultimately to understand if the understanding further lead the students to be able to think about their future roles in the challenge and if the could rightly identify barriers to solutions. In fact, some very easy barriers can be removed with manageable effort and a relatively low capital investment effort and only a small increase in cost and understanding. This was further part of the data I wanted to measure.

To take this further it would be my ambition to measure the learning in alternative situations and measure the impact of the intervention via questionnaires.

Observation

I have further applied overt observation in this visit. Relation means that the participants of the research are aware that they are being observed ( Kawulich, 2005). I have decided on this approach after reading give to use this only two improve the activities and the day out in this instance this assistant was taken after reading ‘Observation Method In Psychology: Naturalistic, Participant And Controlled by Saul McLeoud 2023’ and ‘Participant Observation as a Data Collection Method, Kawulich, (2005)‘ And I have found that observation as a research method does not sit comfortably with my personal values of transparency and authenticity. Kawulich offers that Bernard (1994) adds to this understanding, indicating that participant observation requires a certain amount of deception and impression management.

There is however the opportunity to check for nonverbal expression of feelings, and to witness contribution and interaction and how enthusiastic the interaction (Schmuck, 1997 , Kawulich 2005).

My aim via the observation was to understand if the activities I had designed were suitable and if a large enough portion of the class would benefit from them.

The Observation aspect caused some conflict to my role as an action researcher as action research asked off me to get immersed and lead the activity as the practitioner McNiff (20002) and the observer would take a more passive role which meant that the observer side had to be lower in priority on this time sensitive intervention.

In this chapter I will start discussing the data findings from the ARP project first as those have in turn informed my learning as their tutor which I will discuss at the end.

The Coach Journeys to Kettering and from facility to facility

The itinerary of the day gave me as the organiser plenty of sleepless nights. I was worried about the very tight schedule and traffic, I worried about the cost of the trip (£35 per student including lunch) and coach-sick students.

Our coach driver Will was kind and personable and made sure we had a jolly start to the day and the tone was set.

I handed out the first questionnaire once we had left London and took the opportunity to have little personal chats with the students. They were happy talking about their experience in England and questionnaires to their respective home countries. When I collected the surveys I had more chances to have personal chats and there was a sense of collective excitement.

On the coach journey back to London more of this happened and we started discussing the students’ individual areas of research and what they wanted to specialise in. As there was no pressure of time this felt relaxed and good, high-quality exchange was able to happen.

Creating these bonding moments that were enforced but had no aim inspired me to create more of these occasions so that we can develop a mutual understanding between students and tutors and ultimately support the students better through their short time on the MA.

SATCol external visit – Observation

A very positive aspect was that the day took a dynamic of its own and the staff at the facility and the students needed very little guidance to engage, interact, explain and discuss which put me in a position to be able to observe, understand and evaluate how the activities were unfolding.

During the tour of the facility at the beginning of the day, the students learned quickly what the logistical challenges of this very large operation were and how many processes were needed to feed into turning textile waste into different types of resources. The local team were interested in the student’s attitudes to waste, overproduction/ consumption and the destination of the garments from the consumer onwards.

During the textile sorting exercise, some participants were keen sorters and got involved easily with ideas of how to move the waste into resources. Students who could see the waste as resources were able to convert this into design thinking to reduce the impact of the fallout of garment waste.  The variety of opinions and thinking made me remember the session by Jenny Good as she had discussed the creation of meaning together in a group. I had taken the students to the place and introduced them to the seriousness of a problem but the meaningful approaches were created together and led by them.

The students fed back to the SATCol team about the value of the garments and this was well received and resulted in an ongoing conversation with LCF about repair/ refurbish and up-cycling workshops that prolong the lifecycle of the garments and hence reduce the impact in terms of landfill and carbon footprint of fashion. This knowledge fed back into circular design methods and how to turn waste into resources. Questions came up such as how can we see waste as feedstock? What is missing in order to reclaim textiles and turn them back into resources?

There was a small minority of students who were not enjoying the sorting as much and found it harder to engage. I could sense a barrier of physically handling the products and the ongoing decision-making involved. Some of the decisions were about wearability and the concept of wearability can be abstract depending on the users needs. Via the questionnaires, I discovered that an unnecessary worry to using these garments was hygiene and this might have contributed to the few students who struggled to join in.

SATCol external visit – Questionnaires

I have via the before and after questionnaires found some very useful data on the student’s knowledge and attitudes on the topic and further I gained some insight on how the day went for the students.

I will present here a compilation of the insights with my evaluation of the data captured rather than a detailed data analysis which can be viewed in coded data form here.

Question 1 on both surveys asks about the students’ understanding of textile waste which grew by 2.63/ 10 points during this day. This was reassuring and confirmed that during this day knowledge was built.

In fact all but one student thought their understanding had improved on a scale from 1-10

BEFORE			AFTER
Purple heart	5		Purple heart	8
E123	3		E123	4
007	4		007	7
K	4		K	7
black circle (not filled in)	4		black circle (not filled in)	5
XX	5		XX	7
Panda	6		Panda	10
niu	5		niu	7
black filled in rectangle	5		black filled in rectangle	8
smiley face	6		smiley face	8
S3	7		S3	10
09	4		09	8
yozi	8		yozi	8
#####	7		#####	8
###△△△	8		###△△△	10
Mayonnaise bb ^•ﻌ•^	7		Mayonnaise bb ^•ﻌ•^	8
☁	5		☁	9
Green Tea	7		Green Tea	8
Psc	4		Psc	8
1991	7		1991	9
Baby with spiky hair and big ears	5		Baby with spiky hair and big ears	8
❅	8		❅	9
☘	4		☘	7
cat	5		cat	8
sausage dog !!!	6		sausage dog !!!     (LOVED TODAY)	8
M	4		M	10
M09	8		M09	9
Uc	7		Uc	9
4	6		4	6
Kuchoo Kuchoo	3		Kuchoo Kuchoo.	7

I am assuming that the growth in understanding might have been higher than 2.63 points as the before survey might have been an overestimation and the after survey might have been an overestimation. The reason I came to this conclusion was that in the AFTER survey, I asked the participants to evaluate if the problem of textile waste was bigger than estimated or smaller or the same. Over 70% of the students thought it was bigger. This leads me to the assumption that the students might not have known as much about textile waste as they initially thought and further in it led me to believe that their findings might have been overwhelming.

The LCF staff members on the visit filled in the survey too which is not part of this action research project but they filled them in because they wanted to to give me feedback on the surveys. The staff members who filled in the survey interestingly thought in the majority that the problem of textile waste was smaller than they estimated before the visit and my personal evaluation of this is that staff had more knowledge and therefore could consider solutions and how through technology and development of infrastructures the problem could be quite easily tackled with the up and coming technology and other necessary measures.

Some questions were inconclusive or contradicting and I am putting this down to the questionnaire design and allowing too many answers. In the BEFORE questionnaire, only 12 people put the responsibility of reducing waste on the consumer.

Whereas in the AFTER survey, 23 people thought the responsibility was with the Fashion consumer, nearly double. At no point during the visit was this mentioned and often environmental problems have better success of being resolved via legislation and changes in business’s behaviours.

Curiously a different question regarding the responsibility of facilitating circularity in the product life-cycle was put down to the design and product development departments of brands which has good merit as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation sees this as the area where 90% of all environmental impact of products gets decided.

This of course gave more material to discuss and realign the thinking ask those very important questions and allocate responsibility to the specific areas of engagement that we could decide upon together as a cream team. This was done in the debrief following the session.

One positive shift in the attitudes from before to after was captured in the last question in both surveys:

Do you believe that textile recycling can be a financially viable solution for fashion brands and manufacturers? Why or why not?

Before questionnaire

yes	18
no	7
tentative	5

After questionnaire

yes	24
no	3
tentative	3

This was a strong shift that was facilitated by the better understanding and knowledge that was created. As a result, the students improved their solution thinking and could imagine an implementation of recycling technology with a positive financial outcome.

Ethics Concerns

When analysing the open-ended questions I have found some quotes from students to underpin the ethics consideration about overwhelm and climate anxiety. These quotes were taken out of the AFTER questionnaire and although I had planned to particularly speak about solutions the challenges seemed to be better for some students. Please see the student’s quotes on the question on the reason for their answer about the scale of the problem here:

The quantity of the clothing which need to recycle is too big.

Figures online are very abstract whereas seeing, touching the thrown away garments makes me feel a bit sad of so many clothes are being disposed. Some of them are in good condition and even a wash of the garment before it is abandoned affects a lot on how it is categorized.

I do have to say that I was aware of the quantities of textile waste. Nonetheless, hearing the figure, 68 thousand tonnes, it is still quite shocking.

At first i think the problem it’s simple to deal with however after visit i think my thought it’s too simple and their are still some problem in recycled fabric company with proven technology.

The amount of stock is much bigger than my imagine.

I always know that there is a huge textile waste in every country however when I know the exact data today I was kind of shocked. I’m also thinking that with such a huge textile waste in the UK, what happens in China / America / India, bigger countries with larger populations.

Reading over these answers inspired my wish to address the pollution anxiety with an extra session a couple of days after returning from the visit. In ‘‘Disorientation as a Learning Objective: Applying Transformational Learning Theory in Participatory Action Pedagogy’ Kiely notes that after the disorienting exposure to the particulars of social injustice, students need to recalibrate their emotive base to make meaning out of these experiences.

The debrief centred on decalibration and sharing experiences and brainstorming processes that facilitated recyclability along the product lifecycle. I suggested different approaches to deliver solutions that students could proactively apply immediately to their work to work towards a circular production system.

My research question

Can I increase student engagement with end-of-life textile considerations by taking them on an external visit to a textile collection and sorting facility and exposing them face-to-face to the reality of textile waste and to solutions to avoid wasting raw fibre? 

Aim:

Establish deep knowledge of textile waste and applicable solutions of waste management and avoidance to be implemented in the student’s ongoing work for this knowledge to become embedded and shape to students’ practice and their ongoing careers.

Objectives:

My presentation is a summary of this selection of blog category and I have attached the final version here:

Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2020, ‘VISION OF A CIRCULAR ECONOMY FOR FASHION’, Available at: https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/our-vision-of-a-circular-economy-for-fashion

Fowler, F. J. (2009). Survey research methods (4th ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452230184

Kawulich, B.B. (2005) ‘Participant Observation as a Data Collection Method’. Available at: https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/466/997

MacDonald, C. (2012) ‘UNDERSTANDING PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH: A QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY OPTION’, The Canadian Journal of Action Research, 13(2), pp. 34–50. Available at: https://doi.org/10.33524/cjar.v13i2.37.

McNiff, J. (2002)  Action research for professional development – Concise advice for new action researchers.

Ojala, Maria. (2017). Facing Anxiety in Climate Change Education: From Therapeutic Practice to Hopeful Transgressive Learning. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education. 21. 41-56.

Stein, S. (2019) ‘The Ethical and Ecological Limits of Sustainability: A Decolonial Approach to Climate Change in Higher Education’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 35(3), pp. 198–212. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2019.17.

Ruel, E., Wagner III, W., & Gillespie, B. (2016). The practice of survey research. SAGE Publications, Inc https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483391700

Wilson, B.B. (2020) ‘Disorientation as a Learning Objective: Applying Transformational Learning Theory in Participatory Action Pedagogy’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, p. 0739456X20956382. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X20956382.

WRAP (2023) Circular Design Toolkit for Fashion and Textiles – An introduction to design for circularity, Available at: https://wrap.org.uk/resources/guide/circular-design-toolki

Appendix 1: SATCol Planning Slides in collaboration with SATCol team

Appendix 2: Debrief Session slides

Appendix 3: Data Analysis PG_Cert_APR data_Mikha Mekler

Appendix 4: SATCol relationship development

Appendix 6: Miro Planning page: Thoughts/ PGCert (this is set to public but please request access if it does not click through)

Appendix 7: UAL General Health an