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.