Presented: 10:00 A.M. PT, March 28, 2024
Guest Speakers: Kamila KRYCH (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Moderator: Mitchell JONES (Outreach Editor, Resources, Conservation and Recycling)
Presentation Abstract:
The textile industry is causing environmental impacts, driven by consumption patterns and fast fashion. Here we explore how the closing of material loops can decrease the environmental impacts of clothing consumption. We analyze the clothing system of Norwegian households in 2018 by combining material flow analysis and life cycle assessment. We map the flows to explore this linear system, where most garments are acquired new and leave the system through incineration or export. We develop an alternative scenario, where the circularity increases from 5% to 74%, considering consumer willingness to rent various garment types or buy them secondhand. We reduce the climate change impacts by 57%, water scarcity by 62%, and cumulative energy demand by 47% by assuming a proper set-up of the alternative system and a change in shopping and disposal behavior. Such measures allow to keep the same consumption levels; further reductions require lowering the number of acquisitions.
So a big welcome back to the resources conservation and recycling webinar program my name is Mitchell Jones I’m the Outreach Outreach editor at resources conservation and Recycling and I am your host as always again today so just a couple of brief notes on the program that I always touch on for
Anyone who may be a newcomer to the program before we launch into our uh event today with Camila thank you for being with us Camila um so our program this is the English language version of the resources conservation and recycling webinar program this particular version is running every second Thursday at 10:00
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Institutional and policy Focus resource management practices conservation recycling and resource substitution resource productivity Improvement restructuring of production and consumption profiles and transformation of Industry a few admin points for today so if you are going to communicate in the Q&A uh we would really appreciate if you
Use English this is just so that we have a common language that we can all use to communicate with each other um close captions are available if you uh interested so right now in the zoom environment we have the close captions running I can see they’re also running
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It earlier in the Q&A session we would also offer the option for anybody wanting to speak directly with Camila using their microphone or their camera and microphone combination uh if you would like to discuss something or if or pose your question um verbally you’re very welcome to do that you just need to
Indicate that you would like to do that using the raised hand reaction in your toolbar and uh if time allows we will certainly be sure to invite you onto the floor so our introduction for our speaker today we have Camila K with us we are very fortunate thank you for
Being with us Camila from the Norwegian uh University of Science and Technology she’s going to be speaking with us today on evaluating the current Norwegian clothing system and a circular alternative Kil is completing her PhD in industrial inkology at ntnu Norway with a persistent engagement in the field she
Earned a master’s degree in industrial ecology and served as the president of the student section of the international Society for industrial ecology she studies the consumption of durable goods by combining industrial ecology methods with insights from consumer research and other social sciences her current work focuses on modeling lifetime extension
Strategies particular user orientated strategies such as reuse rental or repair her research interests rolve around the environmental impacts of consumption its social benefits and the physical and social structures that determine consumption patterns thank you so much for being with us today Camila so I’m going to stop sharing my screen
Now so that you’re able to and I’m going to turn the floor over to you thank you Mel so let’s share my screen now okay you should be able to see it now so hi everybody and welcome to my presentation thanks for the really nice introduction and um yes so today I will
Be introducing the work um that I have done with some some people with Maria katalina and Johan so I’m presenting on their behalf and um I’m coming from the industrial ecology program from Anu as was mentioned and this research in particular was funded uh by the research Council of Norway uh the lasting
Project so let’s start the presentation yeah so I’m not sure if all of you are familiar with Norway it’s a country in the north of Europe and um it has some characteristics that um make help you understand the entire presentation and the context of it first of all Norway has quite High GDP
Actually one of the highest in the world um which makes it similar to a lot of other Western countries when it comes to consumption patterns and so on um but Norway is quite a small country in the end it’s around 5 million people and it’s mostly Urban population located
Around Oso area in the South so unfortunately most Norwegians do not live in places like this um although yeah it’s very cynic but what is very important is that it can get pretty cold in Norway so places like this uh indeed might require a lot of
Clothing which brings me to to the point of the presentation um the primary reason why people were clothes if you think of it it’s to basically cover you from from weather conditions to keep you warm to keep you dry when it’s raining so that’s something particularly important in places like Norway um you
You might also just want to cover your body generally speaking right but what comes as something pretty obvious is that it’s not the only reason why people use clothes right so actually I have done my search there is this option in uh PowerPoint where you can look for
Stock images and if you look for images um cool and secured this comes up so you can see clothes is not are not only to keep you warm it’s also to keep you cool in the sense of like if you want to look cool a big part of it is
How you look and how you dress so clothing has an important uh context um in terms of social identity so we don’t use clothing for this weather conditions reasons is also because it just shows who we are and that makes clothing particularly difficult to study because um it’s
Involved in so many different aspects of our life but because clothing is such an important part of um our identity we really like shopping for clothes and well particularly if it’s not too expensive and the prices of clothing has have decreased in the past drastically which allows us to get more
And more of them um people have gotten used to constant style changes which is what drives the consumption system right now and you have a lot of purchases associated with that so obviously a lot of this clothing is is made in in countries in which are kind of cheaper
So then you have all of this shipping through throughout the entire world in ships like this one um and of course there is a lot of environmental pollution related to that both at the production stage but also during the transport um which is why clothing is an important sector to clothing sector is
An important sector to study uh it’s around 3 4% of um typical carbon footprint of of people from Western countries there are also social impacts involved so the low prices of clothing that they experience they come at the cost of well people that do not maybe
Get uh proper wages for for their for their work which is another reason why the clothing sector has received a lot of attention in the past years and another important reason to study it and then you might think of uh something this is particularly common in Norway
I’m not sure how it works in different countries but it’s very common to donate your old clothes to a charity so on the left you have containers from the Norwegian version of the Salvation Army and on the right you have an organization called uff both of them collect clothing and people are very
Eager to put their old clothing in there because they feel like they’re something doing something good for for others for the world and if you look at this contain container here you can even see um some African kids displayed so it brings you again this this feeling of
Okay I’m helping somebody maybe I’m giving clothes to somebody that would not otherwise be able to to afford any which is just part of the picture because well when the clothes leave the the country so in this case Norway you don’t really have much control over what
Happens to it so some of it indeed might end up um in Africa but it might not necessarily be a good thing because then the disposal is is on that country and then well people might not find this clothing useful but especially for example warm clothes that are useful in
Norway might not be as useful there or the even the fashion trends might be somehow different so I’ve read some studies where they um described how this clothing has to be adjusted so that people in Africa will want to use them so it’s not that simple and in many
Cases donating old clothes to charity is not really solution to the problem and it’s just keeps keeps people feel okay with buying just more and more which is what brings me to well we might want to have Greener and more circular clothing and there are many ideas out there in the literature uh
Just to give some examples this is not an exhaustive list um we see that there is some sustainable materials research where well maybe we can produce the same clothing with lower material footprint carbon footprint and so on uh ecodesign sort of the same thing maybe designed for durability for
Reparability it’s also a big trend fiber Toof fiber recycling so what if we could actually recycle things and not just down cycle um things to I don’t know cleaning products which is currently the case um and the most important one for this presentation circular business
Models so this is so to speak other ways of providing the service of of getting clothes that would potentially be better for the environment and an example of this is well just a typical secondhand store so the containers that I have shown you before um these belong to uff and this is a
Shop from uff somewhere I think in Oso and well you can see on this picture it says secondhand for all your needs and wants and that’s exactly why this is so complicated to to fix because if we only talk about clothing needs that could be easy but if we talk about clothing wants
The picture gets a bit more complicated because at this point well if something is cheaper for example you might be more likely to buy more of it because you can afford more and maybe your wants would increase um which I will come back to at some point of my
Presentation and this brings me to our paper that we have published with the journal um the title of the presentation is the same as the title of the of the paper and I encourage you to to look at the paper itself if you are wondering about some details assumptions and
Especially the methodological part of it because I don’t want to make the presentation too boring and too complicated so I will skip most of the of the very methodological details but just this is how everything gets triggered and the production is uh is required to satisfy the needs of the households um
And here on the left side we have new garments coming into the system and they are distributed among uh in store purchases and online purchases but both of these offer new garments and as you can already see this is the majority of the flows into the system and into the
Households then on the bottom you have some processes associated with smaller flows you have secondhand online so this is sort of like Co customer to customer online services where people can exchange clothes with each other uh for free for a fee it depends but yeah customer to customer uh then you have
Inheritance which is well if I give something to a friend or I inherit something from my grandma this would be here and on the bottom you have second hand in store so this is a typical second hand store uh for example the one that I have I sh you before
So this is now Downstream from the household system when people dispose of their clothing uh the clothing would either go to residual waste or or to clothing containers like the ones I showed you before and and um at the end it would well the residual waste um stuff would get
Incinerated part of the stuff that goes into the clothing containers also gets incinerated uh but a majority gets exported and that’s how how I already explained we get track of actually what happens with this so we we might see some reports of like what happens with
These but as I said we don’t really have full control of what what happens because it’s out of the system um so generally speaking you can see how linear this system is right you have things coming in from the left um as new garments and then exiting to the
Right as either incinerated garments or ones that are exported the good thing is that quite a lot um goes to clothing container which is a big uh chance for doing something with it if like the the clothes that go to the residual waste they just get mix with all other types
Of waste and it’s not reusable anymore so that’s something that makes it easier to um to separate things from these clothing containers and potentially Rec recycle it back to the system um right now if you can see there is like a small line over here probably
I can show it here so this is the amount that’s getting sold in in stores as I showed you and it’s not you you might think that secondhand is becoming trendy I know this data is a bit old from 2018 but uh honestly I expected this flow to a bit be a bit
Higher um yes and all together this accounts for almost 60,000 tons of consumption per year for a country of around 5 million people as I mentioned um and this is around the amount that would fit on a ship like this I estimated not sure if my estimation was correct but assuming
Every of this container that you can see um holds like 25 tons that would be around it and this comes to Norway every year so that’s a lot a lot of clothing and now if you look at the distribution of the um of the clothing into different
Types of garment so that’s an important part of our study um we have outerwear pullovers trousers shirts baby garments accessories and t-shirts and artwar so these are represented by the different colors here and um as you can see for example the yellow one is pretty thick which
Means by mass there is quite a lot of t-shirts and underwear that come into the system um this is important also for later parts of the presentation because if you think of it some items are more likely to be rented or bought second hand on others so it’s important to
Understand what kind of things flow into the system um as I mentioned we also use life cycle assessment so we estimated the climate change impact at around 1.6 uh Megaton su2 equivalence and as you can see from The Legend it’s mostly due to production partly also user Mobility
U laundry but production is the major part of it and it might not tell you much it’s around 3% of the orig car carbon footprint which is in line with other studies that we have seen and we also have shown how this is distributed among the different
Processes in the system so more most impacts happen Upstream from the households um which is the the new consumption of new garments then environmental impact per item uh we have some climate change impacts so you have the amount of pieces produced in million pieces and then on
The Y AIS you have kilogram of CO2 per piece and for climate change it looks like this so we have for example outer word that um has the highest impact by piece just because they’re pretty bulky maybe not bulky but pretty heavy uh a lot of uh grams per item and
Then you have um much lower for example for t-shirts and accessories because they’re much lighter um and yeah this is very similar to cumulative energy demand so there is a high correlation between climate change impacts and cumulative energy demand this is also known from other studies these two graphs are basically identical
But the picture looks quite different for water scarcity impacts that we also had to look at uh here you see trousers sticking out the most which um I think mostly comes from the fact that trousers use a lot of cotton that’s pretty water intensive and it uses a lot of water in
Places where water is really scarse as well while on the other hand pullovers are uh assumed to be mostly from synthetic fibers so that requires much less water so that brings me to the fact that well you have all of these clothes in the system uh different types of clothes
As I mentioned some of them are more likely uh to be reused than others so why by having this sort of resolution in our system we can imagine an alternative scenario in which we assume that there is the same level of consumption but less Reliance on new clothing and the
Level of consumption is important because as I mentioned um the reason why people buy clothes might be uh related to um to for example well just need for novelty right um so we don’t want to to take away this option from them so then you have rental that we have introduced
According to willingness to rent by garment type so we have looked at studies how people how much people are willing to to rent different types of garments uh then there is a share increased share of second hand which means um we looked at the waste sorry the quality of garments that go to
Waste and much of it is rated as a quality so it could definitely be reused and then we just assume that all of this a quality clothing gets back into the system system instead of being sent abroad um then we also we didn’t really change anything about inheritance and online secondhand
Channel and then the remaining demand that was left after some of it was rented or bought secondhand well it this one is covered by new clothing and then the important part we assumed no rebound effect here so we assume that if somebody bought one item new in the
Alternative scenario they will buy it also one just from second hand which we know is currently not the case but this is kind of best sense best case scenario what if and the alternative that we came up with looks like this so you can right away see the big circular uh flow over
Here so thanks sorry thanks for the clothing con containers that are of good quality get back into the secondhand in store um the new garments here um have decreased because of it um and also you have rental here on top we have assumed that um each item is
Rented three times and the rentals are one month subscriptions so this is a very conservative estimate but also because you just wanted to see um how it would look like would it still be beneficial to rent in this case and this is the distribution by
Govern type um yes you have quite a lot of trousers and pullovers outerwear being rented here as you can see no sorry both second hand uh t-shirts the blue the the yellow one it’s mostly t-shirts not really underwear um people do not really want to buy underwear secondhand as you might
Imagine and then rental is mostly trousers pullovers and outerwear again so things that are not so close to the body again climate change impact as you can see we managed to decrease it quite a lot because the production impacts are reduced around 57 57% reduction in climate change
Impacts 62% reduction in water scarcity impacts and 47% reduction in cumulative energy demand which is quite a lot if you think about it considering that we didn’t change anything in the production processes and we just managed to kind of recycle things back into the system things that were already in the system
To begin with and this is how it’s distributed across the the different processes um an important part of our study was well assuming that this circular circular scenario could work um you might ask how feasible that is I will welcome any questions about that but just to briefly introduce it um well
If for for this scenario to take place many things would have to happen right the business models that are currently uh just well very minor things they would have to upscale drastically and for example most of the consumption would have to take place in secondhand stores um not in in normal stores right
So then people would have to adjust to the fact that for example you have just one item of a given type and not five different items in different SI sizes so yeah it requires a lot of behavior change but also a lot of um um circular business model setup
Strategy so just to conclude my presentation as you have seen the current Norwegian clothing system is very much linear so most garments are acquired new and most leave the system by insation or export and it’s responsible for around three % of the national carbon footprint and the circular alternative that we
Suggested uh it allows to reduce the impacts by around 50 to 60% uh but it requires a scale up of current business models and it’s only feasible with major behavioral change so people have to be used to buying things for example secondhand there might be some hygiene issues and so on that will
Have to be overcome but it comes at the big advantage that it would allow for keeping the consumption rates high so reducing the impacts while still uh allowing the consumption as it currently is and this brings me to the last point which I think is the major part of this
Research is that if you want to reduce impact further you have to lower consumption which is topic that’s majorly absent from much of the literature that well sufficiency might still be needed even if we do everything from the perspective of uh circular business models or even reducing production
Impacts so that was it thank you for listening and um feel free to contact me as well thank you so much for that presentation CA I have to comment again how very visually have aesthetically pleasing it was and uh you did a great job of making sure that it was
Accessible to everybody I thought thank you so um I will uh I will note that uh the floor is open to questions if anybody has any questions then be sure to enter them in the Q&A now um but while people do that I uh I have a few
Questions of my own that I might start us off with Camila um so I found this really interesting because this you said it is uh from Norway so obviously you said that you have a certain type of clothing and I mean I’m in Austria at the moment
So I know and you know and I’m Australian so um I I can also see differences right and you said you’re polish so um you can see differences when you go to different countries about the types of clothing that people are wearing and and how you know what types
Of material it’s made from and how heavy they are and all those kinds of things um one thing that I kind of wondered whether you included in your analysis so I saw in your graphs that um you started with the the heavier it seemed like there really was a progression in terms
Of size of clothing with your your your environmental parameters you had it one end with the really high impact uh like heavier jackets and things all the way down to uh underwear and and stuff like that which is obviously smaller and uh smaller and from different types of
Fabrics and things like that so the what I wanted to ask you was did you look look at did you look at sort of specific environmental impact so if you were to so here we’re seeing that the larger garments have a bigger environmental impact which sort of would be
Intuitively intuitive right uh and the smaller ones have a smaller impact did you look potentially at sort of like specific impact so in terms of if you take a given mass or a given volume or of material from a pullover versus an underwear or something like that to see
Whether it’s just the fact that one has a lot more material and the other is less material or or the the other things I just kind of wondered where where are the what are the factors that are important you know is it is it the fabric because you know for example
Cotton versus um polyamide or nylon polyamide something like that um this would have obvious differences in what kind of feed stock material was used to make it um and what chemicals and what energy and what processes were needed um but then you’ve also got uh this
Transport factor that you said so I was just curious if you could talk about what are the from your research where did you find are the the most important factors or the most influential factors towards the impact of the clothing other than the the size or the the amount of material that’s
Used yeah thank you for the question um well first of all the numbers that we use for the environmental impacts we we didn’t really make a full life cycle sorry life cycle assessment study it was more life including life cycle impacts but the actual analysis was taken from
Another study that looked very in a very detailed way at how different types of garments are produced which is another reason why this garment resolution was useful because we could match these to the um representative garments that they had so for example they assumed that a dress is
Most likely to be made of synthetic fibers and trousers are most likely to made of cotton so that largely determines the environmental impacts that are associated with that but yeah as I said it was not the major focus of our study but what I personally found really interesting is that if you look
At these impacts by garment and if you think that many people shop for PL me for example that would kind of suggest what you might shop to still get one nice item but kind of half less environmental footprint that’s attached to it which in this case was most like
Small items accessories maybe for women would be leres stuff like that so I found this inside interesting that is really interesting isn’t it so those of the people that want to uh buy underwear or something they they can feel less guy about it when they when they’re doing their
Shopping um the other thing I mean you you mentioned that you had a combined material flow analysis with LCA I was just curious how did you combine those so first you just did one and you did the other as well or you somehow combined them well you have to somehow
Combine them for example when it comes to the um the system boundaries you have to be very specific how you define it uh because for material FL analysis that was pretty straightforward that was just a country of Norway and what happens in there when when it comes to um clothing
Consumption that’s initiated by households so we didn’t look at like industrial clothing um but for LCA the impacts that happen abroad were also part of the system right so in this case we had to make sure that we uh account the Upstream parts that influence the environmental impact of this consumption that happens
In Norway so for example the Upstream impacts that are related to raw material acquisition to production that they’re taken into account um and we link those to the inflows to the system that we had from the material for analysis so that’s sort of how it was led and then we also
Had laundry uh which again we like I didn’t really mention that uh but because it was not a major part of the results but this was also interesting laundry is associated with what you wear and then we looked at um different studies that say how many different
Types of clothes people have and kind of wash um per per year and then Bas on that we were able to assume the laundry impacts as well that’s very interesting actually to know to know that kind of thing what people what they have and what they wash so the other thing you
Were talking about were these donation bins and I actually saw a documentary about this at one point how you and you mentioned that a lot of it gets shipped to to Africa and in this documentary they were also talking about how this is a really big problem because most of the
Time uh huge amount of textiles uh shipped there but basically then the best ones are picked out and the rest um well at least the documentary was insuated they are just dumped and they’re not even uh they’re not incinerated they’re not buried they are just dumped openly and then they also
Can be blown into the ocean um so I I I did see something about this also what I kind of thought was because this is obviously I missed the the figures in your in your presentation uh they were there but I I I missed them so what percentage of the clothing in Norway
Is going to those bins I think you had it there somewhere yeah so the ones that are getting discarded I think around 60% goes to this uh containers and around 40% to residual waste which the ones that go to the residual waste are ones that are on average of worse quality so
Probably people feel like okay this might not be reused by anyone because it has some holes in it or something so I might just put it into the residual waste which um could be a problem if we think of fiber Toof fiber recycling at some point which was not really a major
Focus of this study but um if you want to do something with the clothes afterwards besides just incinerating them that would require all kinds of clothes to be sent to this um this containers and it would also mean a lot more Workforce for sorting these things or new technologies that would allow to
Sort garments according to their quality because the study that I cited as far as I remember it was very much manual work and in Norway Workforce is very expensive so that could be a major issue as well for sorting Downstream yeah and it seems like perhaps there should be more stringent
Sorting of the material that is being exported because there are such huge environmental ramifications with shipping so if they actually sorted stuff very rigorously uh and basically establish things that other countries would actually want as opposed to shipping a lot more stuff uh they would save potentially a lot of
Environmental impact there I kind of I guess that you don’t have the answer to this but it just popped into my mind and I wondered if you maybe also found it curious I wonder how far you can ship something before the environmental impact of the ReUse is worse than incinerating the clothing
So so for example if you if you if you if you just take your clothing and it gets locally redistributed to someone else this is obviously very good if you send it to a neighboring country by a truck this is maybe still better than incinerating the clothing but then I
Wonder how far can you ship something before you would be better off just burning it in your own country than shipping it this is I I know that this is not something that we can answer but it’s something that came to my mind I might have I might have a an answer to
This question because I think as long as we talk about actual shipping um the big ship that I showed in one of the slides actually they do not have as much environmental impact because they’re like very big and bulky and go at low speeds so it’s actually one of the best
Ways to to make things go from place a to place B so assuming that it goes far away but on a ship like this I guess it’s still better to reuse it so maybe question is the question is if it would be reused right yes if it is reused
Abroad or not we don’t really have control over it but then what you’re saying is also that potentially you’re better off shipping something to Africa than you are flying it to your neighboring quality if they kind of want it but as far as I know the African countries are
Also starting to say no don’t send us these things because it’s just creating more issues to us I think waste export lots of waste export is becoming a real problem many countries we had the same in Australia they used to export we well anyway they
Used to export a lot of waste to China and uh oh was it China or Indonesia I don’t know but they don’t do it anymore so much because it’s it’s a tricky issue um what else do I did I want to ask you ah yes I found this super interesting
With the production and laundry um so it kind of seems to me that maybe one of the keys is that we should be trying to make better quality so if all of the environmental impact is in manufacturing and there’s very little in washing or in laundry really we want to be trying to
Create very good quality clothes that are going to be washed many many many many many many times and used uh a great number of times that’s what it seemed to to me um so I was kind of wondering in terms of the secondhand clothes how willing are people to rent clothing or
To um buy secondhand clothing and is there maybe uh an age uh influence there because I feel like um my generation and and so Millennials and and gen gen Zed and these kinds of generations I feel they’re quite open to the concept of buying secondhand clothing and wearing secondhand clothing in fact it’s
Actually quite a a cool a trendy thing to do um but do you know what the sort of yeah what is the acceptance for these Concepts in terms of people are people willing to rent clothes and buy secondhand clothes and is there some sort of age Factor certain age groups
Are more or less willing to do it or yeah so it definitely depends um on the population that we’re talking about as you said like some people are more like to be willing to rent and others and especially young people so for example there are some studies that
Looked at different kind of consumer characteristics so the consumers that are looking for trendy things are the ones that are the most likely to rent because they want their wardrobe to be renewed often um which is why for example we assumed that um like this was a Very um very limiting assumption I would say because we assumed three uh rentals per year monthly rentals for each item so assuming that like okay different items of different colors different sizes each one of them gets rented three times um but then at the end of the year this rental um all
Of these rental clothing would be replaced so that would mean that uh people that are willing to have like past um well past changes like following the trends would still be able to do that while well for some other people it’s much more important to just have clothes
That are comfortable right and that they just like and enjoy so then maybe it’s not as important for these ones to um to have things that are the the newest and so on so like there are different consumer segments and in an Ideal World you’d have things that are good for for
All of them I I like to think of of it that way like imagine that you enter a store and you have two sections of the store you have section that has things that are like super trendy and so on but then maybe not necessarily of good
Quality because if this is trendy it will not be trendy in two years so then what’s the point of making it very durable and having even more environmental impacts Associated to it because to make something durable you have to use more textile to make it for examp example um while you have the
Other section of the store that would have stuff that is more durable and this these things could be reused for longer in the system and they could have design that’s more um yeah lasting but I think that’s also that answers your question it does and it’s a super interesting point it that so
Rentals could well be so for people that are happy to buy clothing and wear it for an extended period that makes complete sense but for people that do want to keep up with the trends and and change their clothing regularly things like rental like clothing rentals would
Be um would be a really good option for that potentially um exactly a sport especially is also I mean you know I’m not I don’t know a lot about fashion but it seems that fashion is quite cyclic anyway so things come back into style so when you when you’re renting something
Uh but you have to store it in the meantime you have to store it in the meantime and that could be an issue I see that there are some questions in the chat yes I have one more and then we’re going to do those um if you could you were talking about
And this this is a key question I think for for me because all of these ideas it seems to me like there are solutions but it’s very very hard to try to get people to change their behavior do you have any any recommendations for things that we
Can do to try to promote this what you said major behavioral change is that how would this be how could we do this any ideas that have cropped up in your research yeah so the focus in our research was more looking into what would happen if we
Assume these things right like there’s a lot of really good consumer research studies that that look into how consumers react to different changes what they’re likely to do what are not so my research is pretty interdisciplinary but I’m not focusing on research um um that has this consumer
Focus right but we do suggest some things at the end of the paper where we say for example U there are examples of established brands that uh create their secondhand um section of the store so that could be a good idea because people already have some kind of Association in
Their mind when it comes to this particular brand they’re more likely to trust this brand also when it comes to second hand clothing so there is quite a lot of them that have started doing it and it seems that people have more trust in them indeed um some other things that
Could uh help with this Behavior change I guess just making the shopping experience for like secondhand clothing as similar as new clothing so um I’ve been to many different kinds of secondhand stores and some of them were not pleasant to be in okay and then this kind of impacts your experience right
You might not want to come there again you might think okay these clothes are not really nice there maybe something is wrong with them uh while if you have a secondhand store that just has nice lighting just nice consumer experience that might also convince people to do
That and there is one for example um in tram when where I’m doing my PhD there is a store like this from this UF brand that I mentioned it’s on the Main Street in the city and it just it just looks like any other store clothing store like
You cannot really tell that it’s secondhand unless you really walk inside and you see there’s just one item of each type and that’s I think the way to go excellent it makes sense it makes sense especially when a lot of fashion has to do with Aesthetics and things
Like that and so if people don’t want stigmatized clothing right um okay so we have some questions here uh the first one thank you for a great presentation I have two questions first what type of data did you base your model on the flows specifically these have been hard
To find for Sweden second I assume that your results are a counterfactual for the year 2018 how do you think the results would differ if you look to the future with an increasing population H okay so first thing um there is good data like that’s true foremost of industrial ecology research
For all countries um Imports data is really good production data is really good because we want to know what’s happening in the country um we want to know what kind of flows are coming in because it’s also being taxed and so on so this this data is really good which
Is why we’re able to get the uh government type resolution in the first place and also different information about about both the weight of the clothing but also the the number of items uh so that’s the the main source of data and then how it gets distributed
Across the system we based it to a large extent on a study um that was uh using 2018 as their reference here which is why our study is the same reference here um study from Watson I think from 2020 you can have a look at it in the paper
And um they have looked at they have interviewed different people um I think I don’t remember the details but they have basically looked at the um all textiles in Norway so we had to also look at just the clothing household clothing part of it uh but they had some
Kind of transfer coefficients between the different processes um so that was very helpful without that study as a background probably wouldn’t be able to to build this system um and the second question regarding how it would look like in the future it’s a good question U well definitely the population increase would mean
More more demand for clothing but also well maybe climate change would mean less demand for clothing because it’s warmer but uh yeah I mean you’d have to as I said it the clothing consumption is very much embedded into the societal structures that are like yeah more like how we want people
To perceive us what’s socially acceptable to wear if I have a hole in my in my pens like is it okay to wear them or not anymore like these sorts of things so it’s difficult to say how Behavior will look like in the future consumer Behavior so that’s mostly
Dependent on that how we evolv as a society very nice we also have a question here did you incorporate the emissions intensity of Norway’s electrical Grid in the ReUse circular scenarios such considerations could impact the results of similar studies in regions with dirtier grids I think we used the Norwegian grid
But this is exactly why we also looked at the cumulative energy demand which is a nice uh indicator to just show you the energy footprint of of your system and then it’s kind of independent on the uh cleanliness of the GD right so then in this case Norway having very green
Electricity coming mostly from hydrop Power um would not really matter because it would still use energy uh another question thank you for the presentation I would like to know if recycling was included in the system boundaries if the answer is yes what type of recycling was considered MH that’s a good question so
It was somewhere down there in the circular scenario um we did assume that clothes that were rated as not maybe good for reuse but good for still being recycled um we did assume some kind of recycling but maybe I didn’t stress it well enough what we really tried to do
In this work is try to align the disposal Behavior with the consumption Behavior because many studies um just think of okay it would be nice to um to maybe reuse something but well people might not want to do and it’s same thing with recycling so if we want to recycle
Just to not incinerate that’s great but we also need to have people that want to buy this recycled products from us and right now fire to fiber recycling is not still a major like there are some technology but it’s it’s not anything that’s upscaled really uh so right now
We we mostly have down cycling uh to like cleaning products or insulation or stuff like that so as far as I remember this is what we also assumed um and yeah there is just limited demand for these kinds of products uh the question here thank you Camila that’s a great and thorough
Presentation I have this one question while modeling the Norwegian household clothing system did you consider the accessories attached to the fashion like buttons sewing threads very important and various labels mm so to answer this question I would have to really look into detail what the
Um what the study we were we basing our research on used so there is this um research I think it was done in in Sweden um where as I mentioned they used different kind of Representative garments and as far like I remember the report was really really long and really
Detailed and thorough um more than 100 pages I think and um I’m quite sure that they would also include these kinds of things um because yeah they just looked at an item on it like as a whole and just okay what that happens at every single stage of the production process
To make it be a readymade product at the end so all of these things I would assume uh assume they were included as well but you would have to check that or just contact me afterwards so that I can check that for you and then uh we have somebody who has
Raised their hand to uh to speak to directly uh or at least I hope they haven’t knocked the button by accident um Fabio Cara I will uh invite you to the floor if you would like to uh if you have a question and you’d like to pose
It to Camila you’re welcome to do so now actually I did it by accident the chance to thanks Camila for the presentation no problems I think we all like to thank Camila for the presentation thank you cill thanks FAO okay so uh I’m going to share my screen now
Just to give the uh the final closing remarks and information about the next session um so thank you so much Camila for your presentation I really really enjoyed it it looks to me like a lot of people really enjoyed it so thank you very much
For being with us um just to note for those who are interested in the next uh sorry Thursday week not next Thursday but the following Thursday uh we’re going to be speaking with Gerald Shen from the University of Minnesota he’s going to be uh talking on the topic of rethinking regulations for upcycling
Food waste to animal feed That’s Thursday the 11th of April 2024 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time so thank you everybody for for being here and thank you so much Camila for your your wonderful presentation and uh I will sign off now uh and uh hopefully see you all Thursday week thank you