Green consumerism
Recent movements
The campaign focused on promoting a change in lifestyle based on convenience. For example, they highlighted easy lifestyle tips such as “planning our outfits in advance makes it easier to get dressed the next day”. This makes it quick for us to get prepared every morning and increases efficiency in the long run. More importantly, it gains us time and interest to combine our clothes in different ways to create new outfits each day. Convenience is a key factor in deciding clothing reuse (Laitala, 2014). By demonstrating convenient little daily habits that can potentially maximise the use of clothes, the campaign was successful in encouraging positive perceptions of green living clothes.
Participants reported having learnt ways to be sustainably fashionable with other green consumerism solutions other than donating and selling clothes.Many of them had improved confidence to restyle by mix-and-match their clothes, and repurpose by making simple crafts using unwanted clothes. They were also more conscious of their purchase decisions and were interested in maximising use of existing clothing. There was only some increase (2.99%) in respondents indicating that they wear their clothes “often” before disposal, and (1.95%) increase in respondents indicating “very often” but the increment was insignificant. It was noted that the campaign had very minimal effect on short term behavioural change.
Clothes Call
Clothes Call is another environmental campaign that promoted clothes repurposing as a solution to reduce textile and leather waste in Singapore by students from WKWSCI. Through various engagements on social media platforms and offline events, Clothes Call encouraged youths aged 15 to 35 to adopt clothes repurposing as a lifestyle choice by teaching them relevant skills for repurposing. Clothes Call worked with government agencies such as National Environment Agency of Singapore (NEA), South-West Community Development Council (SWCDC) and National Youth Council (NYC).
While the audience enjoyed the novelty of skills such as silkscreen printing, embroidery and studding, the skills are specialized, technical and may require additional equipment. The amount of effort required to learn the skills may hinder them from experiencing actual lifestyle benefits from using these skills. It is important to lower the barrier of adopting the promoted behaviour by introducing easy and less technical skills that the audience can engage in on a daily basis.
To find out more, enter this link: http://www.clothescallsg.com/about-us
Private initiatives
It was not long before Ms Lee, who works part-time, began sharing her upcycling tutorials online. And her friends soon encouraged her to start running workshops to show Singaporeans how their unwanted clothes can be turned into something new.
“I was engaged by a lot of corporates and schools, and last year, I decided to have my own series of workshops,” she said. Participants in her full-day workshop learn the basics of sewing using a sewing machine, and try their hand at turning two or three of their own items of clothing into something new.
“At the last workshop, one lady converted her dress into her bag that was really well done, and there was another lady who had never sewn in her life, and she converted two of her husband’s T-shirts into cushion covers, complete with zips,” she recalled.
Small groups of people are working to address the issue but sustainability is a collective effort.