TRANSCRIPT
Mounds of discarded uniforms are being sorted at a warehouse in Sydney’s northwest. They were collected by a small business with a big goal - to reduce the amount of textiles sent to landfill, as volunteer Lily Watt explains.
“My job today was sorting the clothes into colours, so whites and the colours. I'm very passionate on not contributing to landfill and recycling is very important you know the environment is a big – it’s got a place in my heart.”
Lily lives in the local area and finished high school last year. She was happy to find an outlet for her old, unwanted uniforms.
“Being the youngest child, I didn't know what to do with my uniforms when I left school, as my oldest siblings just gave them down to me. But then I found out about this process and I donated my uniforms.”
Lily’s uniforms are among thousands received by a small family business, called Worn Up. Its focus is turning fabric into furniture!
And with 9,000 schools in Australia, there’s a huge resource out there, according to co-founder Murray Fuller.
“We’ve gone to certain schools, large ones usually, and sometimes they've unloaded 1.1 tonnes of clothes to us after one year. So it's very disappointing how much waste there is.”
Across the country, co-founder Annie Thompson says the disused school clothing mountain keeps growing.
“The volumes are extraordinary. There's over 4 million school students in Australia wearing uniforms. Each one of those wears 10 kilos of uniforms, say over a 12-to-24 month period. Schools want to have this problem solved!”
It’s estimated that each year Australian schools send around 2, 000 tonnes of uniforms to landfill. And that’s just part of the problem. Australia makes and imports 1.4 billion units of clothing annually – or more than 370, 000 tonnes. Ms Thompson explains.
“Textile waste is a huge problem. Most of that ends up in landfill. Only a quarter of the textile waste is recycled because we don't have the infrastructure in Australia yet. It's really upsetting because there's so much that we can do with these materials.”
And this is how Worn Up does it. The old uniforms are shredded and then blended with other materials and pressed at high temperatures to form colourful, flat boards. Ms Thompson says the boards can be shaped into table tops and other items.
Clothing is notoriously hard to upcycle. We like uniforms because it's predictable fibre and it's mostly polyester and polyester is terrible, it sits for 100 years in landfill. So, we want to extract that value and the embodied energy that's been used in making them and turn them into something useful.”
Ms Thompson is in her second year of a masters’ degree in sustainable development and says Worn Up grew from an earlier sustainable school clothing venture.
“We worked with 195 schools nationally. People would send their uniforms up from Tasmania, they were so keen. And we worked with 13 councils who paid for those schools to send their uniforms up to us and be processed.”
Australia’s national science organisation CSIRO has been part of this journey through its KickStart program. Manager Dr Megan [[MEE-gan]] Sebben explains.
“We started working with Annie and the team at Worn Up in around 2022. They approached us about applying to the Kickstart program and connecting with CSIRO researchers So, the CSIRO Kickstart project looked at testing the product to see how strong it was and then also looked at areas where we could improve, say things like strength or other aspects of the material as well.”
At the Worn Up showroom, there’s a range of prototypes – from tables to chairs, benchtops even cutting boards repurposed from colourful fabrics. For now though, Ms Thompson says while production scales up, they’ve stopped collecting from schools and are focussing on business uniforms instead.
“We really need funding to get to be commercially scalable and move forward. We think there's great opportunity for us in commercial furniture. It's made in Australia. We're hoping to work with some of the bigger commercial manufacturers.”
In fact, discarded uniforms are just part of the burgeoning clothing waste problem. According the Australia Institute, the average Australian buys around 56 new items each year, with more than 200-thousand tonnes of clothing – many containing synthetic components – later ending up in landfill. It’s one reason the CSIRO says turning fabric into furniture is a better option. Dr Sebben explains:
“The product is really novel and it addresses quite a serious problem that we have in sustainability and circular economy that's not often talked about in comparison to other plastics and pollutants. CSIRO has a real commitment to an initiative around ending plastic waste. So, we've identified it as being a very serious global challenge. So, for us, collaborating with companies like Worn Up is a really good opportunity to start to address this in a number of different ways, including industry applications to end this huge problem that we've got.”
And while recycling is welcomed by many environmental organisations including Planet Ark, its Head of Circular Economy Development Dr Nicole Garofano says more is needed.
“Initiatives like Worn Up are fantastic for keeping materials in use, but us as individuals what can we do? We have 1.4 billion units of new clothing manufactured or imported into Australia each year, most of which are non-sustainable, non-durable materials. 200,000 tons of clothing - that's clothing not textiles broadly - goes to landfill in Australia each year. So, while recycling, which is what these initiatives are a wonderful reuse of valuable materials what do we actually need to do? We actually need to need to reduce our consumption of materials and in this case textiles.”
Many recycled products are part of Australia’s circular economy. Co-founder Annie Thompson hopes FABtec may do even more, one day helping to ease the growing global textile waste burden.
“We'd really love to see Fabtech go global. We are a global first made in Australia, and that would be fantastic for us to see it become the norm everywhere. We recently did a display at the Design Expo in Sydney and we had an overwhelming response from interior designers, architects, and industrial designers. And we've got a few orders from that. We're on the path to commercialisation. Eventually, can you imagine if every student in Australia all 4 million of them sat at a desk made from their uniforms?”
