Convo No. 3
Tina Mueller is a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), with a focus on sustainable consumer behaviour, behavioural change, and their interaction.
What is your personal relationship to sustainability & fashion?
I was interested in sustainable consumption for quite some time, and also did that for my studies, because I believe we are in trouble at the moment and need to act. Clothing and fashion is a very interesting consumer good as it serves many different needs, e.g. as protection and shelter, but also more psychological needs like expressing self-identity, to identify with a group, or for beauty. It’s a very thankful area of research. What fashion means to us individually is an interesting question to discuss when thinking about how we can transfer or translate these same values and ideas of fashion into sustainable fashion consumption.
You’re involved in EU funded project, Trash2Cash, aiming to take textile waste and make it into new fibres. Tell us more about this!
My work with Trash2Cash brings together many different disciplines, and Copenhagen Business School stands for the consumer side, where I’m interested in how to promote the consumption of recycled materials.
We’re working towards making new garments out of recycled garments without having it only be used or downgraded to a type of rug or car door filling. The problem is that post-consumer waste is a mix of all kinds of material, of varying quantity, with different colours, and their own individual exposure to chemicals. Making this pile of mixed clothing recyclable, into a fibre that can be used for new garments, is tricky.
We also need to consider people’s perceptions of recycling. One way in which we explore these perceptions is through our fake online shop, where we assess how much people are willing to pay for different recycled products. Another aspect to consider is the perception of quality of the recycled products, for example questions about the longevity of the recycled garment in comparison to virgin fibre garments. It’s important to note that these are still only perceived barriers as our aim is a quality of recycled fibres or garments equal to that of virgin materials. These are all areas of research that need to be considered and are under continuous development.
My personal interest is more concerned with simply consuming less, or anti-consumption if you will. For example, what are the characteristics of people who consume less, and how can we motivate others to also consume less based on the profiles of these people. How much is enough, and how much do we really need – these are controversial questions to ask in the fashion industry, but they are nonetheless important questions to ask, also to ourselves. This was a heated topic for discussion when I attended a panel talk by Fashion Changers during Berlin Fashion Week earlier this year.
Any interesting findings to share?
We have to stop (and soon reverse) our CO2 emissions and the fashion industry plays a huge part in this. It’s really about consuming less, and to me slow fashion is the way forward. It does matter if you as an individual decide to not buy a certain item. So, the idea that your contribution doesn’t make a difference is wrong.
One thing we do is have a look at barriers of intentions to behave in a certain way. We have a lot of people saying they care or they want to be sustainable consumers, so we’re looking at ways in which we can close this intention-behaviour gap. This year we’re doing an intervention following a group of people for about 3 months where we provide them with information about sustainability in fashion, but also about the impact of their consumption behaviours. By giving them a clear idea of what their actions mean for the environment (in terms of C02, water usage etc.), for example when buying a shirt or a pair of jeans, we hope to guide their behaviour towards buying less.
On a critical note, we are working with the single consumer, but the work that needs to be done goes beyond the single consumer. There needs to be policy measures for organisations, for example the German ministry of environment tried to organise a roundtable of fashion to tackle this from a policy perspective.
Preliminary evidence on a study we conducted around the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, as well as following surveys, suggest that consumers see policy makers, retailers, manufacturers and themselves all as responsible (though themselves slightly less than the first groups) for the wider implications of the fashion industry, as well as responsible for doing something to fix it. Media and NGOs were seen as being responsible to a lesser degree. We also found initial evidence suggesting that the more someone perceives the responsibility to be shared between different actors, the less they are likely to engage or act themselves (the bystander intervention concept from psychology). From these results we believe it would be beneficial to analyse in more detail who is responsible for what within the realm of their responsibilities and what they can do.
Do you consider yourself an optimist or pessimist when it comes to the current and future state of the fashion industry?
I stay optimistic in my everyday work, we can’t just give up! I will keep doing that and with a passion. But as for the general state of where we are I am pessimistic, time is here for change and that quickly. The question is how to make it easier for people to change and turn around.
Any tips/advice for people who want to contribute to making fashion more sustainable?
Engage! Find out what you think, do you agree with current practices? And remember that your changes as an individual consumer do matter!
To know more about Trash2Cash or other research initiatives check out the Hey Mag resource page.
