Waste Generation and Management at the Workrooms

Fashion and design generate TONS of waste.  If taken in the aggregate, we are talking hundreds of thousands of tons every day.

We fight against this in a couple of ways: recycling, composting, and reuse.

Chicago doesn’t have a robust recycling program, so we do what we can with paper and plastic.
We use all absorbent scraps of fabric generated from cutting up here by turning them into rags and dustmops.


What doesn’t get turned into a dustmop or rag is then composted, as are the rags and dustmops themselves.

Our compost is packaged every week and set aside to be taken to special compost bins run on Tchad’s homestead in Indiana.

Compost and scraps in the storage rooms waiting to be taken to the compost bins.
Compost and scraps in the storage rooms waiting to be taken to the compost bins.

Overall, we’ve gotten our general waste down to one 30 gallon bag of trash per week during the class season – in off time it is substantially less.

Fashion, sewing, and design are inherently waste-producing, but they needn’t be blindly wasteful.