Finding a solution

Donna Cleveland was in her second year of her fashion design degree when the lecturer laid out that the industry she was about to work in was killing the planet. More than 120 million kilograms of textiles go to New Zealand landfill each year.

Most people think they are doing good when they drop their garments off to the local charity shop but the reality is that only 20 per cent of those clothes are sold. “The rest gets baled up and sent to Papua New Guinea. They have the option of looking at what they are getting and paying a premium or paying less and taking what they get. Then they decide what is worth keeping and what will end up in their landfills,” says Cleveland.

It was statistics like this that shocked her into doing something about it and she decided to focus her Masters study on trying to find a solution. At the end of the year Cleveland collected all the textile waste from the fashion design studios at AUT and began sorting through it in an attempt to turn it into new garments and eventually made the problem the focus of her PhD thesis. Cleveland managed to convince three companies to get on board and give her their waste. She then went on the hunt to find industry-sized machinery that could break down the fabric and found it in carding machines, used on local farms, and convinced the owners to help her prove her concept. Cleveland then turned to AUT’s Textile Design lab to use a specialist knitting machine that can knit the new yarn, or use a FeltLOOM machine that turns the fabric into felt. Her concept worked, and beautiful new fabric emerged from the fabric scraps she’d collected three years earlier.

“This model has the potential to change perceptions of our garments and the value within them,” she says.